From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
To: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>, git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Finer timestamps and serialization in git
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 16:16:00 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ae62476c-1642-0b9c-86a5-c2c8cddf9dfb@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190515191605.21D394703049@snark.thyrsus.com>
On 5/15/2019 3:16 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> The deeper problem is that I want something from Git that I cannot
> have with 1-second granularity. That is: a unique timestamp on each
> commit in a repository.
This is impossible in a distributed version control system like Git
(where the commits are immutable). No matter your precision, there is
a chance that two machiens commit at the exact same moment on two different
machines and then those commits are merged into the same branch. Even
when you specify a committer, there are many environments where a set
of parallel machines are creating commits with the same identity.
> Why do I want this? There are number of reasons, all related to a
> mathematical concept called "total ordering". At present, commits in
> a Git repository only have partial ordering.
This is true of any directed acyclic graph. If you want a total ordering
that is completely unambiguous, then you should think about maintaining
a linear commit history by requiring rebasing instead of merging.
> One consequence is that
> action stamps - the committer/date pairs I use as VCS-independent commit
> identifications in reposurgeon - are not unique. When a patch sequence
> is applied, it can easily happen fast enough to give several successive
> commits the same committer-ID and timestamp.
Sorting by committer/date pairs sounds like an unhelpful idea, as that
does not take any graph topology into account. It happens that commits
can actually have an _earlier_ commit date than its parent.
> More deeply, the lack of total ordering means that repository graphs
> don't have a single canonical serialized form. This sounds abstract
> but it means there are surgical operations I can't regression-test
> properly. My colleague Edward Cree has found cases where git fast-export
> can issue a stream dump for which git fast-import won't necessarily
> re-color certain interior nodes the same way when it's read back in
> and I'm pretty sure the absence of total ordering on the branch tips
> is at the bottom of that.
If you use `git rev-list --topo-order` with a fixed set of refs to start,
then the total ordering given is well-defined (and it is a linear
extension of the partial order given by the commit graph). However, this
ordering is not stable: adding another merge commit may swap the order between
two commits lower in the order.
> I'm willing to write patches if this direction is accepted. I've figured
> out how to make fast-import streams upward-compatible with finer-grained
> timestamps.
Changing the granularity of timestamps requires changing the commit format,
which is probably a non-starter. More universally-useful suggestions have
been blocked due to keeping the file format consistent.
Thanks,
-Stolee
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-05-15 20:16 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 33+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-05-15 19:16 Finer timestamps and serialization in git Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-15 20:16 ` Derrick Stolee [this message]
2019-05-15 20:28 ` Jason Pyeron
2019-05-15 21:14 ` Derrick Stolee
2019-05-15 22:07 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-05-16 0:28 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-16 1:25 ` Derrick Stolee
2019-05-20 15:05 ` Michal Suchánek
2019-05-20 16:36 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-20 17:22 ` Derrick Stolee
2019-05-20 21:32 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-15 23:40 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-19 0:16 ` Philip Oakley
2019-05-19 4:09 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-19 10:07 ` Philip Oakley
2019-05-15 23:32 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-16 1:14 ` Derrick Stolee
2019-05-16 9:50 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-05-19 23:15 ` Jakub Narebski
2019-05-20 0:45 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-20 9:43 ` Jakub Narebski
2019-05-20 10:08 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-05-20 12:40 ` Jeff King
2019-05-20 14:14 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-20 14:41 ` Michal Suchánek
2019-05-20 22:18 ` Philip Oakley
2019-05-20 21:38 ` Elijah Newren
2019-05-20 23:12 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-21 0:08 ` Jakub Narebski
2019-05-21 1:05 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-15 20:20 ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2019-05-16 0:35 ` Eric S. Raymond
2019-05-16 4:14 ` Jeff King
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