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Comments on How can I make --reset-author the default?
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How can I make --reset-author the default?
I do a lot of rebasing and amending of my topic branches. I don't think it's especially useful for me or my colleagues to see in the logs what date it was when I first started working on the particular topic - only when I actually submitted it.
I know I can explicitly reset the date of my commit to the current time using git commit --amend --reset-author. But is there any way I can change that behaviour to be the default when I rebase or amend, so I don't have to type it every time?
For example: on Monday I put in a new feature and submit the patch for peer review. On Tuesday, my team lead wants me to make some changes to my patch and resubmit. On Wednesday I make the changes, git commit --amend them, and submit the new patch for review. On Thursday the new changes are approved. I pull the master branch and rebase my changes on it.
Right now, that commit entry in my log will still be timestamped Monday, even though I amended on Wednesday and rebased on Thursday. In the future, when we look through the logs, the useful date is when I've finished and push the change (Thursday), not the date of the first commit that no longer exists (Monday). To update the date, now on Thursday, I need to go a git commit --amend --reset-author --no-edit. If I don't do that, it will still say that my change was on a Monday, when it was not.
(Alternatively: am I missing something here? Is it actually useful for people to know that I started work on the topic on Monday, rather than that the change was actually put in on Thursday? Is there a way to see both the datestamp of a commit and the date the commit was actually added to the tree?)
Post
Rather that doing git commit --amend --date= every time you commit, you can coalesce commits at merge time using git merge --squash.
That said, for non-trivial topic branches, it is usually valuable to retain the commits in the topic branch to figure out why a particular change was made. For instance, if you are developing a feature in a feature branch, this might require some refactorings, or non-obvious bugfixes, that would be better described in a commit of their own.
In general, I find a detailed and truthful history more valuable than a pretty one: The purpose of history is not to look beautiful, but to be able to figure out why a certain change was made. Yes, unnecessary information may slow the inspection of history, but deleted necessary information will halt it.
PS: You may have noticed that this answer does not mention commit dates. That's because they rarely matter in my experience: When inspecting history, I care about the "what" and "why", not usually the "when". And even when I care about the "when", it'll only be about the year, or the release, not the day. Therefore, the choice of commit frequency or squashing should not be affected by dating considerations.
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