Get commit author date, rather than committer date

[garyking]

When I amend a commit, its date in the .date() method gets updated. Please give us an option to also retrieve the original, author date for a commit, too.

It seems like git log actually defaults to showing the author date too, rather than the committer date.

[rcjsuen]

@garyking To get the author's information or the committer's information, simply use commit.author().when() or commit.committer().when().

As to your issue about amending, how would you get the original, pre-amended commit's date information from the CLI git?

[garyking]

Thanks, that method worked. I can't find the method in the docs though.

And, I mean the original creation date of the commit. That's the "author date" I assume. While the "committer date" is basically the last time the commit was touched.

[maxkorp]

Pedantically speaking, "the last time the commit was touched" and "the original creation date of the commit" are the same, as a touched commit is an entirely new commit.

The idea carries semantic value though, and you are exactly correct in that author date is meant to provide that information. When a commit is rebased or otherwise recreated, the new commit takes the "source" commit's author info as its own. In the case of a new from scratch commit, that's the same as the commiter info, obviously.

Amend may be a bit different, since it's intent may be to make bigger changes, but I don't actually know. I'd assume it's the same way, since it's semantic intent is still to "change" a commit, rather than create a new commit, regardless of what actually happens under the covers

I'll make an issue in the docs repo that author info is seemingly missing.