Re: Clarification for the use of additional fields in the message body

Frans Klaver
2015-07-07T14:13:12Z

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 1:53 PM, SF Markus Elfring
<elfring@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>> I think that as far as these kernel mailing lists are concerned,
>> the date of the update suggestion is the date on which you submitted the patch,
>> rather than the date you originally committed it to your local tree.
>
> I imagine that there are committers who would like to keep
> corresponding software development history a bit more accurate.

I guess it depends on what your view on accurate is.

>> If you wish to keep track of this evolution for yourself, or
>> wish to share it, you're better off stashing it somewhere in a
>> (public) git repo that you control.
>
> Would it be nicer to preserve such data directly also
> by the usual mail interface?
>
>
>> If you insist on placing the date somewhere, you can also put the date
>> there if you wish. It'll be ignored by git when applied.
>
> This content management tool provides the capability to store
> the discussed information by the parameters "--author=" and "--date=",
> doesn't it?
> Is the environment variable "GIT_AUTHOR_DATE" also interesting occasionally?
>
> How often do you take extra care for passing appropriate data there?

I can't remember ever changing or explicitly preserving the commit
date. I don't think I care enough. I did change the author on botched
patches, but that's an exception. Remembering the author separately
from the committer is something git does by design anyway.

Frans