how to rebase and keep commits in chronological order?

Question

I would like to rebase a branch on the master branch but in such a way that all commits show up in chronological order in the git log. Is this possible without git rebase

Answer 1

If you want to keep the original dates, you are stuck with rebasing according to your dates.

However, if you want to create a pull request and get the commits sorted correctly in a tool that sorts by author date (TFS and GitHub both do), you might want to change the dates instead.

Windows: git rebase --force-rebase --exec "ping localhost -n 3" --exec "git commit --amend --date=now" master

Linux: git rebase --force-rebase --exec "sleep 2" --exec "git commit --amend --date=now" master

Note that doing git rebase --ignore-date master does not work, because the date only has second resolution and different commits will get the same date and be sorted in an unspecified order. If you use --exec and --ignore-date together, the --ignore-date parameter will be ignored. Because it is incompatible with interactive mode, which --exec uses.