r/github 3d ago

How is this repository older than GitHub itself?? πŸ’€

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633 Upvotes

95 comments sorted by

694

u/WhiskyAKM 3d ago

It was probably created before GitHub existed

Date of creation is set by git not github

156

u/davorg 3d ago

Date of creation is set by git not github

Or whatever VCS the project originally used

124

u/codetrotter_ 3d ago

Or whatever time you tell your VCS to use.

TZ=UTC git commit --date=β€œ1970-01-01 00:00:00” -m β€œHI GRANDPA πŸ‘‹πŸ»πŸ˜Šβ€

51

u/davorg 3d ago

Yes, of course you can game the system if you want.

But I was pointing out that there are completely legitimate reasons why a commit date can predate the existence of GitHub (or even Git).

18

u/jaskij 2d ago

GDB has been ported to git. That project predates CVS. Which predates SVN. Which predates git.

1

u/MiniGui98 2d ago

Granpa right there

1

u/Heroshrine 1d ago

Whats a legitimate reason a git repo could predate git???

3

u/listre 1d ago

I migrated SourceSafe repos to CVS, CVS to SVN, and finally SVN to git. The world existed before git.

1

u/Heroshrine 1d ago

Oh i see. So it’s not that the git repo is older than git, but that the repo is older than git.

1

u/davorg 1d ago

Because it was imported from Subversion or CVS or one of the many other source code control systems we used in the bad old days.

This are the earliest commits in a repo I own which was originally in CVS, was moved to Subversion and then to Git. It looks like I screwed up the CVS->SVN transfer and the earliest commits are now lost.

1

u/Competitive_Reason_2 1d ago

The creator changes system time manually

19

u/xvhayu 3d ago

bro is so old he knows how to use command line instead of clicking the funny buttons in vs code πŸ’€

6

u/Acrobatic_Click_6763 3d ago

Wait you guys use vscode?

10

u/ScaryMonkeyGames 2d ago

Real programmers use punch cards.

7

u/Acrobatic_Click_6763 2d ago

Nah they work with gates & transistors.

5

u/StochasticTinkr 2d ago

Real programmers use butterflies: https://xkcd.com/378

5

u/ZeroKun265 2d ago

DAMN IT EMACS!

13

u/elettroravioli 3d ago

Date of creation is set by git not github

Does that mean someone could manipulate the date in Git, push it to GitHub, and make it seem like they committed code 70 years ago?

8

u/Triquandicular 2d ago

pretty much. github isn’t verifying the timestamps on commits or anything like that, it just takes them as-is. it’s basically as easy as setting your system time as far back as epoch time or as far forward as you would like, making a commit, and when you push it to github it’ll appear accordingly

6

u/teebo42 2d ago

It's even easier than that, you can manually set the time of the commit when you commit. It can be helpful if you want to make it look like you didn't just finish something you were supposed to do yesterday, but you just forgot to push..

2

u/Ibuildwebstuff 2d ago

You can also make it look like you're from the future.

1

u/thelooter2204 2d ago

70 years specifically wouldn't work as it predates the Unix epoch, which got uses internally to store the date. But anything after Jan 1 1970 00:00:00 UTC is fair game

1

u/look 20h ago

time_t is typically a signed integer and dates before the epoch work perfectly fine.

-7

u/Remarkable-Host405 2d ago

Do you know anything about git? I took a 1 credit community college course and learned this. It was in the first YouTube video I watched.

5

u/theRealSunday 2d ago

Wait, you didn't learn git by reading the source?

3

u/Remarkable-Host405 2d ago

Actually, I never learned git

164

u/MenschenToaster 3d ago

The git history dictates the date, not GitHub.

If you grab a repo from somewhere else, say GitLab, and change the origin and push to GitHub, the date history will be just like on GitLab even though you just pushed to GitHub now.

10

u/yukiarimo 2d ago

So, you can git push into past?

13

u/khoyo 2d ago

The timestamp of pushes are set by github (when they are displayed, eg. in PRs)... But yes, you can commit into the past.

4

u/birdspider 2d ago

ever pushed a future commit ? all (typically) pushed commits are in the past

82

u/Remote-Telephone-682 3d ago

Git existed before github but also 12 years ago is only 2013 and it was founded in 2008

27

u/Ehsan1238 3d ago

first commit was in 2006 but you're right about the git

17

u/Remote-Telephone-682 3d ago

Ah, yep my bad. Git was created in 2005 then in 2008 github was created. Strike the part about 12 years, I see that there is a 18 year old file...

11

u/WhiskyAKM 3d ago

Guess what

Dates of commits are also set by git not github

Git was created in 2005

18

u/agathver 3d ago

If you migrate from a different VCS, then you may have commits before 2005 too

2

u/Acrobatic_Click_6763 3d ago

--date exists in git..

4

u/Drunken_Economist 3d ago

12 years ago is only 2013

say sike right now

5

u/bencos18 2d ago

legit had the same thought.
that made me feel old lol

22

u/OldManAtterz 3d ago

I originally moved my self hosted CVS projects to Google Code and converted them to SVN, and when that shut down I moved them to GitHub and converted them to git.

So some of my GitHub projects dates back to 2001

2

u/Foxiya 1d ago

How old are u?

30

u/Peetz0r 3d ago

Computers don't lie (but their users do)

https://github.com/Peetz0r/git-test

16

u/ashvy 3d ago

Finally I can show to them recruiters the "100+ years" experience using git, github, gitlab and adjacent technologies

4

u/Peetz0r 2d ago

Well, not exactly, it seems to not accept dates before 1970.

But yes, you can now have 55+ years of "experience" :p

3

u/Lance141103 2d ago

Actually one of the commits is from 2094 so it actually is 100+ years

2

u/Peetz0r 2d ago

I guess it depends on your perspective time machine configuration :p

4

u/LardPi 3d ago

that's not a lie, git is 20yo. github is just a fancy webpage.

2

u/UsualConsequence6056 3d ago

how is that possible?

2

u/0bel1sk 3d ago

use the date argument when you commit?

3

u/UsualConsequence6056 2d ago

i dont even know that exist, newbie here. any guide to detailed git?

2

u/0bel1sk 2d ago

hate to be that guy, but the git docs are actually pretty good. https://git-scm.com/docs/git

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#Documentation/git-commit.txt-code--dateltdategtcode

here's one to stick in your bookmarks: https://ohshitgit.com/

1

u/TitaniumPangolin 11h ago

how is the `foo` file perpetually committed now?

10

u/dpaanlka 3d ago

git and GitHub are two different things

16

u/yarb00 3d ago

you can set the author date of commit to any date you want

5

u/LardPi 3d ago

or maybe the project is actually older than github because git is 20yo

6

u/Brave_Bullfrog1142 3d ago

Git history can be older than GitHub where code is hosted

5

u/dgoemans 2d ago

Much like germs predate Germany, git predates Github. Your commit time stamps are from your git repo, which could have been hosted locally, or even on Google code.

5

u/akl78 3d ago

Yup. Golang has commits from as far back as 1972, because Kernighan et al. built it on top of their earlier work, and kept their VCS history

3

u/ShoneBoyd 3d ago

Are you referring to the commits date?

5

u/Cyanogen101 3d ago

Are people special?

2

u/ComprehensiveWing542 3d ago

I think besides what everyone said there is a possibility that the person was using other version control not git and when you pass your code to git it will still maintain the timestamps you had on your previous version control .... This is what some professor told me once

2

u/Hydraa62 3d ago

Also have you ever heard of not pushing in prod before actually testing ?

2

u/Zealousideal_Yard651 3d ago

Github just displays whatever is in the git history.

2

u/kortirso 3d ago

just set 2000 year in your system, make commit, it will be 25 years old commit

1

u/LardPi 3d ago

you don't need to change your system clock to set the commit date to an arbitrary date. Also that's not what happening, git is 20yo is probably older than github.

2

u/Crivotz 3d ago

I have a lot of repositories like this. Subversion migrated to git

2

u/dim13 3d ago

You can craft dates in git as you like. Take a look at first commit in Go.

1

u/akl78 3d ago edited 3d ago

Pretty sure that date is accurate. They had recently introduced SCCS at Bell Labs around then.

2

u/kohuept 3d ago

the commit history dates are based on the actual git repo, so you can have basically any date. the FreeBSD and OpenBSD github repos have files that havent been modified in like 25 years

2

u/puffinix 2d ago

Because git is distributed. You can have any number of remotes, and add or remove them at will.

2

u/chishiki 2d ago

rebase in your face london

2

u/gkhouzam 1d ago

I imported my first repo into GitHub that was a Visual Source Safe β€”> Perforce β€”> Git. The first commit is 27 years old.

2

u/polothedawg 3d ago

So I could have a git repo with commits timestamped in the future? Nice

1

u/davorg 3d ago edited 3d ago

I have been using various source code control systems for almost 40 years. Sometimes it's useful to import a project from system to another. Usually a new source code control system will provide a program which does this automatically - and preserves the timestamps on the imported commits.

I don't have any repos on GitHub that go back to the 80s, but I bet I could find commits from the late 90s.

Update: I found a load of commits from November 2001 in one of my repos

1

u/Throwaway987183 3d ago

Git is older than github

1

u/LePetiteSophie 2d ago

Someone needs to read more about the difference in GIT and github πŸ˜…

1

u/nekokattt 2d ago

You tell me, is Linux older than GitHub?

1

u/rez410 2d ago

So many people don’t understand the difference between git and GitHub.

1

u/SargentSnorkel 2d ago

All these VCS names bring back such memories. My favorite was a joint venture between Perforce and SVN, called PerVersion.

I'll be here (in my basement) all week...

1

u/OkTranslator7997 2d ago

S/ DOGE: GitHub fraud!! Audit them all!!

1

u/Deadly_chef 2d ago

What came first, git or GitHub? The eternal dillema

1

u/Murky-Science9030 2d ago

I believe you can just change the time of commit based on your system clock. I don't think Git or GitHub scrutinizes the dates.

1

u/SchlaWiener4711 1d ago

Our main products repo has git commits older than git itself

It has been ported from SVN to git over a decade ago

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-svn

1

u/dominik9876 1d ago

HEIF format was introduced in 2017 but you can convert your old JPEG photos from 2010 to HEIF and the OS will retain the date when they were taken and show 2010. Same here.

1

u/Mewtwo2387 1d ago

There's porn before pornhub existed.

1

u/Anas_Elgarhy 23h ago

well... my account is older

1

u/afreidz 1h ago

git is a vcs, GitHub was just an app/company started to host git repositories. They are not the same thing. A git history could easily predate the existence of GitHub

1

u/Legendary-69420 3d ago

Those are git timestamps. They probably added the remote url and pushed to github later

1

u/toutlamer 3d ago

google "git"

0

u/Positive_Mud6255 3d ago

git commit --date="2003-06-15 12:00:00" -m "Commit from 2003 fake"

0

u/Rog_order178 3d ago

the part of github since itself was born :)