If you look at the code from the article, you’ll see that the author did not filter out merge commits. The word merge doesn’t even appear in the article. The OPs data includes merge commits.

You’re trying to draw a hard and idealized line that doesn’t exist in real companies. Squashes often happen right before push. Stashing for the weekend rather than committing is common. People unsafely leaving uncommitted changes in their workspace over the weekend is common. Most devs in my experience are not git experts, and they don’t always use git in best practices kinds of ways. That is made evident every time there’s a git thread on HN.

I am talking about commit time, my push policy affects my commit times. You can’t count on commit times to demonstrate anything.

Edited to add: apparently something in my phrasing is leading you to believe that I'm angry with you and wanting to attack you. I'm not sure what that is, but that isn't my intention. I just think what you're saying isn't true, or rather is presumably true of your company but not of this article, and I was trying to explain why. I'm sorry for writing in what is apparently an aggressive tone.

Maybe you missed that I pointed out above that Linus makes a lot of merge commits, and you’ve just ignored my previous point about merge commits which is completely and directly relevant to my comments. The article included Linus’ merge commits in their histogram of his commit times. If Linus is waiting to merge like I do, then the data is skewed. If Linus is code reviewing and emailing in the morning, and writing code at night, then the data is misleading.

Merge commits are really the same as non-merge commits. The only difference is the number of parent commits, which is irrelevant for this discussion.

Obviously the methodology is limited but it does seem to work well in practice. If you have evidence that the statistics are wrong for one of the listed programmers, please do share it.

I absolutely did no such thing. You may wish to consider taking that untrue statement back, for the sake of your integrity. Nothing I said is attacking you personally in any way.

You called for a retraction of my top comment, implying it is flip-flopping and hypocritical, but you misunderstood my argument and made a rebuttal point that didn't address mine. That's a straw man, and since you appear to believe "straw man" is judgemental, it is not. It simply means you're arguing against a different point than the one I made.

It's a fact that you haven't yet responded to the merge commit point I made, and that merge commits in the OPs data are relevant to my original comment.

> I regret having given you so much time

You make it sound like I'm supposed to appreciate you calling my words untrue and "completely irrelevant". How does arguing with me and saying I'm attempting to defend an irrelevant position amount to you extending good faith?

Very extreme stance! Especially for so deep in thread. Sometimes it’s nice to make your ideas more specific as you go deeper in conversation, not just radicalize and double down.

Whether that correlation models reality closely enough to be useful depends.

My understanding of your “commit time demonstrates nothing” assertion is that you are saying there is no useful information there, which seemed like a radical position for so deep in the thread.

git commit --amend --reset-author changes both author time and commit time.

git rebase changes commit time.

All three commands can be used just before a merge and push to clean things up. So there is no guarantee that the author time or commit time we see in the final commit history accurately represents the actual time at which the work was done.