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

[Giuseppe Bilotta <giuseppe.bilotta@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Giuseppe Bilotta 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.
>>
>> 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.
>
> You can disable reflog by setting core.logAllRefUpdates to false...
> which of course do not remove reflog.  But checking for this config
> variable in gitweb shouldn't be too hard, although you would need
> to somehow change assumption that we are interested only in ^gitweb\.
> section of config.
>
> There is other side of this issue: reflog is expired, so you can
> have empty reflog if branch was updated long time ago.

I'm thinking that what I could do (that should always work as
expected) is to consider as 'last modified' the most recent date
between the commit date and the reflog date (if the reflog is found).
This basically implements an 'automatic' fallback for
disabled/obsolete/expired reflog to commit date. (Of course, assuming
the last commit doesn't suffer from a ridicously long clockskew in the
future.)

>> 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?
>
> Almost correct.  Some tools (old StGit for example) didn't provide
> reflog message, and with empty message they forgot to append TAB
> separator.  So you would have to provide for legacy
>
>  <old sha-1> <new-sha-1> <committer> <timestamp> <timezone>
>
> instead of correct (for empty reflog message)
>
>  <old sha-1> <new-sha-1> <committer> <timestamp> <timezone> TAB

That's the easy part: split at TAB, get the first array entry, split
at spaces, get the last two. But thanks for making me aware of the
possibly missing TAB

> P.S. It is a pity that due to packed refs stat-ing branch tip file
> $GIT_DIR/refs/heads/<branch> is not enough...

Yeah, that's what the other rbot developer suggested initially (then I
found out that cloning the repo was enough to NOT have branch heads).

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta