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I recently rebased my most recent commits to my master branch interactively (rebase -i). I squashed multiple commits into just two, discarding unneeded commit messages (fixup), and subsequently pushed to remote master (on GitHub).

What I noticed is that the commit dates in the remote repo does not correspond to the date of the commit (as provided by git log). Rather the commit dates on the remote branch correspond to the date of rebasing and pushing. From what I can find, the commit history on the remote repo is supposed to correspond to the local one, but the commit dates in my remote and local branch are divergent. I can only assume this has something to do with rebasing, and that my original commits where tampered with.

Output from git log:
% git log
commit 09e76b90aa1c0c3f6a780c8b29b0c93dc2f57143 (HEAD -> master, origin/master)
Author: John Doe <john@doe.com>
Date:   Wed Apr 12 13:23:12 2023 +0200

    1st imputation success no interaction or random sl

commit 2ef860eabd90dfff5197c66a3dbb541174e1146b
Author: John Doe <john@doe.com>
Date:   Thu Mar 9 22:32:49 2023 +0800

    First commit on Arch Linux
History on GitHub:

enter image description here

  • Why do the commit dates on the local and remote branch diverge?
  • Is there a way to change Git/GitHub's behaviour so that the commit dates correspond?
Pål Bjartan
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    It's talking about _commit_ dates, and the output from log shows _author_ date. If you showed the commit dates in log, you would see that there is a match. Try with `git log --pretty=fuller` – eftshift0 Apr 17 '23 at 08:21
  • @eftshift0 The commit dates are indeed identical. I was unaware there was a difference between commit date and author date. [`git rebase --committer-date-is-author-date HEAD~2`](https://stackoverflow.com/a/28537098/9434803) and then forrce-pushing to remote resolved the issue. Please add as an answer and I will tick it off as resolved. – Pål Bjartan Apr 17 '23 at 08:57

1 Answers1

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It's talking about commit dates, and the output from log shows author date. If you showed the commit dates in log, you would see that there is a match. Try with git log --pretty=fuller

With regards to the second question:

In order to change the commit dates to correspond to author dates, git rebase has --committer-date-is-author-date for this purpose. Rebase with the added flag and then force-pushing to remote resolved the issue for this particular case.

Code example:

git rebase --committer-date-is-author-date HEAD~2
git push -f origin master
Pål Bjartan
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eftshift0
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