Re: [PATCHv2 5/6] gitweb: last-modified time should be commiter, not author

[Deskin Miller <deskinm@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 04:54, Giuseppe Bilotta
<giuseppe.bilotta@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Assuming that you have reflog enabled (yes, it is default now)...
>> So you would have to provide fallback in the case there is no reflog.
>>
>> BTW. "git reflog" is porcelain; it would be better to parse reflog
>> directly, I think.

Agreed on a fallback being necessary; as for parsing the log directly,
that seems fine, but I might be inclined to use git log -g --date=foo
and then parse that.  But that's still using porcelain at some level.

In my copious free time I'm working on a patch to expose reflog
information through git log -g using new --pretty=format: specifiers,
but even my initial attempts to carry reflog information through to
the point in the code where it could be output broke some testcases;
it'll be a long while before I grok what's going on enough to make it
work.  But I digress.

> Does disabling reflog remove old reflogs? IOW, can I check if reflog
> is enabled just by opening the reflog file and assuming reflog isn't
> enabled if it's not there? Falling back to the commit date would still
> work decently.

This seems easy enough to test.  If switching core.logAllRefUpdates
from true -> false doesn't remove the log, though (and why would
git-config delete reflog files?), you could have an old log which just
hasn't been updated for some time, where the branch head might not
appear at all.  But that's just idle speculation without testing the
actual behaviour.

> Since we're only interested in the last reflog date, what we can do is
> to read the last line and get the unix time which is held two places
> before the tab separating the metadata from the log message. Correct?

Looking at the log format I'd say that seems fine.

Glad to see I was thinking clearly, suggesting reflog :)

Deskin Miller