Re: git and time

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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Matthew L Foster wrote:
>> 
>> I am not saying git should "police any one else's clocks", I am saying git should be designed or
>> configured in such a way, using local time, that it obviates the current reliance on everyone
>> else's clock being set correctly. 
>
> Matt!
>
> THERE IS NO SUCH RELIANCE! NONE.
>
> Trust me. When we say that git ignores time, WE MEAN IT. Git does not rely 
> on time, git does not use time, git does not CARE!
>
> Please stop looking at gitweb _immediately_. If you think time has some 
> meaning for git, stop. It doesn't. We've told you over and over and over 
> again that there is absolutely _zero_ reliance on everybody else's clock 
> being set correctly. The damn clock could go _backwards_, or make huge 
> jumping purple leaps of imagination, and git wouldn't care.

I think Matthew means (by "relying") that everybody's clock must
be set correctly in order for us to show the commits in gitweb
or rev-list output so that their timestamps are monotonically
decreasing (because we list things from newer to older).  I
sympathise.

We order things by causality (i.e. ancestry order), but that
unfortunately (!!)  happens to match timestamp order for simple
history made on a single machine.  This can easily lead to such
a misunderstanding that we are somehow trying to show things in
linear time order, hence we subscribe to the notion of global,
uniform and monotonic time.

Of course, we don't.

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