Re: git equivalent to pulling the most recent date from ChangeLog?

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 25 December 2017 at 20:10, sfeam via gnuplot-beta wrote:
> Building from git tip fails to insert a valid date into
> the "last modified" field.   This used to be pulled from the
> top of ChangeLog and inserted into timestamp.h but that
> mechanism does not track the date of git commits.
>
> On that note, I see that git commits keep their original date
> (of construction?) rather than the date they were committed.

There are two separate dates. Author date and committer date. I don't
know how SourceForge works, but on GitHub at least the committer date
would correspond to the timestamp of clicking the "merge" button of
pull requests. Still, that doesn't help with you committing your local
changes directly.

> That means "git log" returns non-sequential dates in the
> history of changes.  That does not seem like a great idea.
> Is there a setting somewhere that tells git to stamp each
> commit with the current date instead?

No. Git is a distributed version control system and it doesn't treat
SourceForge any different from your local repository.

Note that before pushing anything to the public repository you can
arbitrarily change both author and commit timestamps of any given
commit (you can prepare a script that will fix anything you want), but
you cannot enforce any special setting on the server.

If you committed something 10 days ago and the development on
SourceForge was active in the meantime, your local commit will not be
modified, at least not automatically. If you rebase your commit, the
author date (the one you see) will stay 10 days behind, only the
commit date will change to match the timestamp of when you ran the
rebase.

I'm pretty sure that it's possible for you to set up something locally
that will modify the timestamps of your own commits before pushing to
SourceForge, but that doesn't guarantee that any other developer will
do the same and there's probably nothing you can do about it (short of
being the only one with commit rights).

Also, if you cherry-pick commits from master branch to some stable
branch, the author dates will not change.

Mojca