On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 4:33 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes: > On 06/12/2015 09:31 AM, Robert Haas wrote: >> Could we update our git hook to refuse a push of a new commit whose >> timestamp is more than, say, 24 hours in the past? Our commit history >> has some timestamps in it now that are over a month off, and it's >> really easy to do, because when you rebase a commit, it keeps the old >> timestamp. If you then merge or cherry-pick that into an official >> branch rather than patch + commit, you end up with this problem unless >> you are careful to fix it by hand. It would be nice to prevent >> further mistakes of this sort, as they create confusion.
> I think 24 hours is probably fairly generous,
Yeah ... if we're going to try to enforce a linear-looking history, ISTM the requirement ought to be "newer than the latest commit on the same branch". Perhaps that would be unduly hard to implement though.
From a quick look at our existing script, I think that's doable, but I'd have to do some more detailed verification before I'm sure. And we'd have to figure out some way to deal with a push with multiple commits in it, but it should certainly be doable if the first one is.
Would we in that case want to enforce linearity *and* recent-ness, or just linearity? as in, do we care about the commit time even if it doesn't change the order?
FWIW, our git_changelog script tries to avoid this problem by paying attention to CommitDate not Date. But I agree that it's confusing when those fields are far apart.
That brings it back to the enforcing - would we want to enforce both those?
(And to confuse it even more, Date gets renamed to AuthorDate when you do a full log.. But AFAIK it's the same date, they just change the name of it)
