Hi all:
I'm writing a daily build script for all the OpenRISC components, so every day I need to check out several git repositories with the source code of many tools that depend on each other.
The hole process takes hours. In order to minimize the risk of repository skew, I thought I could just take the current date and time, clone all repositories to my local PC and check them all out at that particular timestamp.
I figured out that something like git "checkout HEAD@{2011-08-21 10:00:00}" does not really cut it. I'm getting this warning:
warning: Log for 'HEAD' only goes back to Sun, 21 Aug 2011 10:00:02 +0200.
The reason is, the timestamp was taken at 10:00, and the repository was cloned 2 seconds later, which means that 10:00 is earlier than the repository. That was totally unexpected, but then I found this in the documentation for "gitrevisions":
Note that this looks up the state of your local ref at
a given time; e.g., what was in your local master branch last week.
If you want to look at commits made during certain times,
see --since and --until.
I guess that means the HEAD@{date} syntax does not do what I expected. But hey, it's not the first time I find the git docs hard to follow... }8-)
By the way, it would be nice if the gitrevisions documentation could be improved, as I still don't understand what that really means. Say, for example, an hour ago I had temporarily checked out last year's versions, but half an hour ago I went back to this year's versions. If I check out at HEAD@{1 hour ago}, will I get then last year's version, or this year's?
Anyway, my real problem is with the mentioned --until option. "git checkout" does not understand that option, so I guess I need to feed the date to some other git command in order to get the commit ID for "git checkout", right? Can someone help me here?
Or even better, can someone add this kind of explanation to the "git checkout" documentation? If you are used to other version control systems, and wish to checkout the versions at a particular date, that's the documentation page you first look at.
For extra karma points, git checkout could understand the --until option itself.
Many thanks in advance,
R. Diez
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