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Re: How far should we trust ChangeLog attribution dates?
On Thu, 21 Dec 2017, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Jeff Law <law@redhat.com>:
> > I think we've routinely made the ChangeLog date the commit date.
>
> Ah, so you modify patches as they come in?
Yes. It's explicitly documented at
https://gcc.gnu.org/svnwrite.html#checkin - "Use the current date/time for
the ChangeLog entry, not the time that the patch was submitted.".
(Personally I find author dates generally unhelpful when they differ
significantly from commit dates - author dates on a patch or patch series
that was many times revised and rebased tend to relate to an old version
of the patch and provide no clue to when one might find discussions
relating to anything similar to the final committed version - they also
mean you need to explicitly query with "git tag --contains" to see what
releases had a fix, or look at commit dates, rather than knowing it at a
glance from the date displayed by default which is the author date.)
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com