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Savrige
Savrige

Reputation: 3755

Git Log default order criteria

When I run git log --oneline for example, it outputs a list of commits in chronologic order (descendent). My question is: What criteria git uses to sort this list? Does it use the author_date or the committer_date to order the result? Or it uses another? This can be an issue for me if it sort by committer_date as this attribute can change over time. I appreciate any help about this.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 786

Answers (1)

leonbloy
leonbloy

Reputation: 75926

Actually the primary sort criterion is given by the parent-child relationships, which are always respected in log listings (if three commits are chained A->B->C they will never be displayed in A C B order, no matter the dates or the log options).

But when we are displaying commits from paralell branches, there is some freedom in the ordering. For this scenario, there exist the options --date-order --topo-order. And here, "date-order" (the default) means the committer_date. If you wish to sort by the author date, there is the additional option --author-date-order.

If you are listing commits from a single branch, then these options are irrelevant.

Doc: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#_commit_ordering

---1----2----4----7
    \              \
     3----5----6----8----9--

Suppose you have this commit history (copied from docs) where the horizontal coordinate corresponds to the (author) date. Then the log list will display:

date-order  topo-order      topo-order (alt)
   9             9              9  
   8             8              8  
   7             6              7  
   6             5              4  
   4             3              2  
   5             7              6  
   2             4              5  
   3             2              3  
   1             1              1

More info here

Upvotes: 4

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