On 12/30/2014 09:12 PM, Robert Dailey wrote:
> I was surprised to find today that the following didn't work as expected:
>
> $ git show master@{"1 year ago"}:Path/To/File.h
>
> It gave me the following warning which did not make the problem obvious at
> all:
> warning: Log for 'master' only goes back to Mon, 8 Sep 2014 12:08:44 -0500.
>
> What it is trying to tell me (and I only found this out after a lot of
> poking and prodding around Google) is that I can't refer to a commit
> by date if it extends beyond the range of the reflog.
>
> I don't understand why this requirement is in place. Each commit has a
> time stamp, so in theory it should be possible to calculate an
> absolute date from the duration specified in the refspec and grab the
> commit from `git log` from that.
>
> I can only assume I'm oversimplifying things and that there is a good
> reason for this. If I can't get this to work, how can I view the
> contents of a file at a specified relative time frame as I have done
> above?
The syntax you are using,
master@{"1 year ago"}
tells you "what commit was the master branch in this clone pointing at
one year ago?" What you presumably expected is "What is the last [1]
commit that is *currently* on the master branch that was committed at
least one year ago?"
The command to ask your question is something like
git log --date-order --before='1 year ago' -1 master
There is yet a third similar question: "What is the last commit that is
currently on the master branch that was *authored* at least one year
ago? Please note that this question is even subtler, because author
timestamps are often out-of-order even on a single branch (whereas
commit timestamps are usually in order). I don't know of a simple git
command to answer this question.
Michael
[1] Note that "last" is a bit subtle, because the history of "master"
probably contains multiple branches with interleaved dates. So depending
on your needs, you might want to add an option like "--first-parent"
--
Michael Haggerty
[email protected]
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