Datetime not displayed for commits (relative date is limited in helpfulness)

[spencer-microsoft]

Description

Having the datetime of the commit in the History is really helpful, but in recent versions, it only shows the relative time, and it's in the left pane, which gets truncated if the user's name is long. It would be incredibly helpful to have the datetime shown in the main window with the commit ("December 17th 2017 at 3:11pm") rather than in the history pane as a relative date ("a week ago", "4 minutes ago", etc).

Version

GitHub Desktop version: 1.0.13

OS version: 10.13.3 (17D47)

Steps to Reproduce

No specific steps - just a general feature request

[iAmWillShepherd]

Thanks for taking the time to open an issue! 🙇

I can definitely see how knowing the exact date and time a commit was created could be useful 👍

[shiftkey]

@spencer-microsoft thanks for the feedback.

For reference, the full timestamp is available by hovering on the tooltip in the history panel:

We're always striving to be consistent with GitHub The Website, and I think we've overlooked the fact that they also have the relative time in the commit details (and the tooltip shows the absolute time):

I think we should do the same thing in the commit details in Desktop:

We have a component for rendering relative time already, and the commit authors are defined here, if someone is interested in adding in support:

desktop/app/src/ui/history/commit-summary.tsx

Lines 296 to 305 in 458a427

	<li
	className="commit-summary-meta-item without-truncation"
	aria-label="Author"
	>
	<AvatarStack users={this.state.avatarUsers} />
	<CommitAttribution
	gitHubRepository={this.props.repository.gitHubRepository}
	commit={this.props.commit}
	/>
	</li>

[niik]

Thanks for taking the time to contribute @spencer-microsoft!

Using relative time stamps is a conscious design decision. As @shiftkey pointed out you can get to the exact date by hovering. Relative times are time zone independent, quite compact and doesn't require regional formatting (which is troublesome for us at the moment, see #1257 (comment)

I don't foresee us changing this any time soon so I'm going to close this issue out but we'd welcome a new issue to discuss whether also including the date in the commit details view would make sense. With the addition of co-authors and the redesigned commit list items in the history tab we should revisit that.

cc @donokuda

[maddes-b]

+1 for making this an option. "1h ago" is not precise (can be anything from 60 to 119 minutes ago), just give admins all information so they can work without hassle.

[RobertKrawitz]

+1 for making this an option, again. I would be fine with (in fact, I'd prefer) displaying UTC dates and times in ISO 8601 format, which have no timezone issues or regional formatting problems. I want something efficient, not "friendly".

[zsbee]

+1, Last Week / 3 weeks ago is really vague, I would be totally happy with absolute local dates. (let me care about timezones myself if it affects my team). Sometimes you need to collect a timeline for a postmortem and this makes it a lot harder than it should be.

[RobertKrawitz]

I don't understand the argument about it being a locale issue if the time can be displayed by hover. The tooltip clearly can render the date, so why can't it be rendered in other contexts?