Re: Recording the date at which a change was pushed to Savannah

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Glenn Morris writes:
>
>  > Obviously the same sort of [commit date/push date lag] will apply
>  > if someone delays pushing their local commits to Savannah. Or the
>  > next time a long-lived feature branch gets merged to master.
>
> As I wrote before, I think it's reasonable to want to know when a
> commit was pushed.

This is a distributed version control system.  I can push a branch from
my own repository to repository C, make a pull request for the owner of
repository D, they merge their own branches into the respective results
and push to different branches in the "main" repository where the
branches are eventually merged.

So when was that commit pushed into the upstream repository?  You are
likely looking for something akin to the file creation date of the
object blob in the "upstream" repository.  That's sort of the thing one
might expect to be stored in the ephemeral reflog but it turns out it
isn't.

It's also a very shaky piece of information and must not be part of the
commit itself because then it would change the commit id.  And it really
makes only sense repository-locally.  And it's not like one can access
the reflog of a remote repository either.

So "when a commit was pushed" rather than "committed/created" is
information that cannot sensibly be maintained in distributed version
control systems and workflows with a commit identity in some readily
available form since it is, by its nature, repository-local and thus not
available for anybody not having local access to the main repository.

-- 
David Kastrup