Re: [Flightgear-devel] OSGText Linux/Mac

[Florent R. <f.r...@fr...>]

wki...@gm... wrote:

> ahhhh... they're doing tags instead of branches... well, there are some
> branches but... ok... i was looking at the commit messages for this
> information... will give this a try... thanks!

A tag is just a (hopefully) human-readable name attached to a unique
commit (there are signed tags too, based on OpenPGP). A branch is a
linear series of commits. OSG is using both tags and branches, AFAICS.

> [time passes]
>
> i'm not sure if i should be working these in log order or in actual date
> order... i've done this in log order since that's the order in which they were
> applied to the repo...

Yep, it's log order that matters. There are two dates attached to a Git
commit: the author date and the committer date. When you create a
commit, unless specific date options are used, both are equal. But if
I commit today someone's patch written in 2012 with:

  git commit --author="Joe contributor <ad...@ex...>" \
             --date=2012-10-05 ...

or similar, it will have the specified date as the author date, and
today as the committer date. If I haven't pushed the commit to the
Internet and choose to modify it locally (its message, its contents or
rebase it on another commit which will become its parent), by default
only the committer date is changed, set to the time of the operation.

Plain 'git log' only shows the author dates, which are often out of
order, and this is not a problem. To see the committer dates too, one
can use 'git log --format=fuller' which uses this format:

   commit <sha1>
   Author:     <author>
   AuthorDate: <author date>
   Commit:     <committer>
   CommitDate: <committer date>

   <title line>

   <full commit message>

In short:
  - log order = commit ancestry order (parents vs. children): good
  - author date is purely informational, and has no bearing with the
    parent-child relationships between commits.

Regards

-- 
Florent