Re: Understanding why Git defaults to show author date and not committer date

[Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de>]

On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 01:54:02PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>> In a workflow based on mailing patches, the committer date is usually
>> much less interesting. It is "when the maintainer happened to pick up
>> your patch", as opposed to when you wrote it.
>
>True.  In mailing list workflow, the author date recorded is usually
>the date that the patch was sent to the mailing list, which may be
>later than when you wrote it, but is much more relevant as that is
>closer to the time when anybody other than the author have seen the
>patch for the first time.
>
but why do you consider this more interesting than when the commit 
actually hit the target branch? why would most people exploring branch 
histories care more for the "meta" surrounding submissions rather than 
when they actually started to matter to users?

>> Likewise, we show the author's name by default, not the committer's.
>
which should be kept, because the committer identity is much less 
interesting in most workflows.

showing author name + committer date by default may seem unclean, but 
it's what is most *useful*.

if the change was to be made, it would have to be visualized to avoid 
confusion. i kinda like s/Date:/Stamp:/ because it's short and the 
metaphor kinda makes sense. "Committed:" seems worse. format=fuller's 
"CommitDate" seems even worse in this context.

the new default should get a new somewhat arbitrary name like "compact".
note that i'm not worried about backwards compatibility, as somebody 
parsing the porcelain output without even specifying a format doesn't 
deserve differently.