1513629 - moz-phab should preserve commit times/dates

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Conduit :: moz-phab, enhancement)

Description

[Jean-Yves Avenard [:jya]]

Now I don't know if the culprit is arcdiff or moz-phab, but I just noticed that all commits date after pushing a stack of patches gets rewritten to the time at which the patch was pushed to phabricator.

It would be nice if the original time stayed.

I find this useful when reviewing patches to get a feel on how much work went into it, or how long it has been stuck in limbo or what else.

Comment 1

[:glob ✱]

i'm not sure if you're talking about client-side from a developer's perspective, or phabricator-side from a reviewer's perspective.  so i'll answer both :)

client-side:

unfortunately this isn't something we can fix.

the commit description is rewritten to inject the phabricator url, which is then used to determine if an existing revision should be updated or a new revision created during a subsequent submission.

we do have some longer term plans to avoid the rewrite by moving the commit<-->revision mapping out of the commit description as this will reduce the submission time.  leaving the commit's date untouched would be a side effect of this change.  see https://docs.google.com/document/d/14v33dMrAvs9KlhYVdbN7yYqJpubs8XFpnrDlsZTPBW0 for details.

server-side:

unfortunately this isn't something we can fix.

timestamps for diffs on phabricator are when they are submitted, local timestamps aren't a factor.

Comment 2

[Jean-Yves Avenard [:jya]]

(In reply to Byron Jones ‹:glob› 🎈 from comment #1)
> i'm not sure if you're talking about client-side from a developer's
> perspective, or phabricator-side from a reviewer's perspective.  so i'll
> answer both :)
> 
> client-side:
> 
> unfortunately this isn't something we can fix.
> 
> the commit description is rewritten to inject the phabricator url, which is
> then used to determine if an existing revision should be updated or a new
> revision created during a subsequent submission.
> 

Amending the commit message typically doesn't change the date.
So at least with git, to modify the date you have to specifically ask for it when amending the message.

So client side, the date shouldn't be modified, or setting the date to what it was should "work"

> server-side:
> 
> unfortunately this isn't something we can fix.
> 
> timestamps for diffs on phabricator are when they are submitted, local
> timestamps aren't a factor.

That I can understand :)