While preparing some stats for a recent blog post on A Decade of TILs, I ran into an issue referencing chuncks of time further back than 2020.
❯ git diff --diff-filter=A --name-only HEAD@{2016-02-06}..HEAD@{2017-02-06} -- "*.md"
warning: log for 'HEAD' only goes back to Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:26:27 -0600
warning: log for 'HEAD' only goes back to Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:26:27 -0600This is because HEAD@... is a reference to the reflog. The reflog is a
local-only log of objects and activity in the repository. That date looks
suspiciously like the time that I got this specific machine and cloned the
repo.
In order to access this information, I need a different approach of finding references that bound these points in time.
How about asking rev-list for the first commit it can find before the given
dates in 2017 and 2016 and then using those.
❯ git rev-list -1 --before="2017-02-07 00:00" HEAD
17db6bc4468616786a8f597a10d252c24183d82e
❯ git rev-list -1 --before="2016-02-07 00:00" HEAD
f1d3d1f796007662ff448d6ba0e3bbf38a2b858d
❯ git diff --diff-filter=A --name-only f1d3d1f796007662ff448d6ba0e3bbf38a2b858d..17db6bc4468616786a8f597a10d252c24183d82e -- "*.md"
# git outputs a bunch of files ...