Re: GIT_COMMITTER_* and reflog

[Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>]

On Saturday 26 October 2019 02:20:39 Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Luke Dashjr wrote:
> > It appears the reflog currently allows its log data (name and date) to be
> > overridden by the GIT_COMMITTER_* environment variables. At least for my
> > workflow, this kinda breaks the reflog (as I regularly set
> > GIT_COMMITTER_DATE to produce deterministic commit objects).
>
> Can you say more about this?  What is the workflow this is part of?  Can
> you describe a sequence of steps and how you are affected during those
> steps?

I maintain a bleeding-edge variant of a more stable project, which is 
constantly being rebased on the latest stable version. To make this easier, I 
use a Perl script to generate the bleeding-edge version's git branches:
    https://github.com/bitcoinknots/assemble-deriv
It uses GIT_COMMITTER_DATE to ensure that I can repeatedly generate the branch 
until everything merges successfully, without polluting the repository with 
hundreds of merge commits each attempt. (Which would be annoying, since I 
literally never prune.)

Because git's reflog also uses GIT_COMMITTER_DATE, my reflogs (HEAD in 
particular) get polluted with incorrect timestamps during this process.

> > Is there a need to support this override for the reflog?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Is there any reason it can't be changed to use GIT_REFLOG_* instead?
>
> Would a new GIT_REFLOG_* set of envvars that overrides GIT_COMMITTER_*
> work for you?  If I understand correctly, you could set
> GIT_REFLOG_NAME and GIT_REFLOG_EMAIL to an appropriate identity, but
> you wouldn't have a good value to put in GIT_REFLOG_DATE.
>
> If GIT_COMMITTER_{NAME,EMAIL} were used when writing reflogs but
> GIT_COMMITTER_DATE weren't, would that help with your workflow?

Yes, it's really only GIT_COMMITTER_DATE that's messing me up personally.
I never use GIT_COMMITTER_{NAME,EMAIL}.

Luke