JADDOG

Earlier this year my laptop battery died. I had to remove it from my laptop to get my laptop to even boot. Through quite a fiasco I hope the battery is on the way and I’ll have it soon. I’ve been without for over a month now. In the mean time my system clock needs updating every time I boot. I guess the laptop needs the battery to keep the system time accurate when the machine is not running. For a while my machine would boot with the date as Feb 06 2009 10pm. Today it seems that my clock boots to Feb 17 2009 10pm. When I forget to run ntpdate to update my system clock all my git commit timestamps are wrong.

Today is the second time I’ve have to fix my dates so I’m blogging this fix so it’s easier to find when/if I ever need it again:

git filter-branch --env-filter \
    'if [ $GIT_COMMIT = 119f9ecf58069b265ab22f1f97d2b648faf932e0 ]
     then
         export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="Fri Jan 2 21:38:53 2009 -0800"
         export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Sat May 19 01:01:01 2007 -0700"
     fi'

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/454734/how-can-one-change-the-timestamp-of-an-old-commit-in-git

I just thrown the above command into a little bash script and called it fix. If you run this more than once you’ll get an error:

$ ./fix
Namespace refs/original/ not empty

To fix the broken “fix” script just rm -rf the directory it’s refering to:

$ rm -rf .git/refs/original/*
$ ./fix
Rewrite 6b37ac946f9b2af3a0e66657038a1c4cafaeab89 (63/63)
Ref ‘refs/heads/master’ was rewritten

As I’m writing this I’m told my manager has tried to ping me in irc to tell me my new battery is in. I didn’t get the message because my client has disconnected for some reason. Now I will have a new battery, hopefully no system time problem and a new irc problem. Such is life.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under Code, Just Another Day.