"Last updated" metadata not preserved after versioning

[Josh-Cena]

🐛 Bug Report

Description

All versioned docs have the same "last updated" info: the time and author when that version was frozen.

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

Yes

Steps to reproduce

Check https://docusaurus.io/docs/next/markdown-features/admonitions versus https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/admonitions: the former has a date that's prior to the latter because the latter is when the 2.0.0-beta.6 folder was created, not the actual doc commit date.

I guess we should freeze the last updated metadata as well? Versioned docs can still be updated though...

[slorber]

I understand the problem, not sure exactly how to solve this 🤪

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Maybe we should persist both in frontmatter:

• the last update date of the original doc when creating a version
• the date when the version was created

And do max(dateOriginalDocUpdate,dateUpdate)
Unless dateUpdate === dateVersionCreated in which case we use dateOriginalDocUpdate (is doc was not modified, just versioned/copied, so we ignore the fs date?)

That seems overly complex 😓

---

Maybe we should find a way to set a correct date on copied files, but I'm not sure it's possible the way we use Git history

[Josh-Cena]

We should find a way to specifically ignore one timestamp from the git history. Probably by adding extra logic in the doc versioning CLI?

[dfranco]

I kind of have the same issue using 3.9.2.

I had to disable git created/ last updated in docusaurus config.

Is there any ETA or solutions for this issue ?

[slorber]

We still don't know what should be done to fix this problem.

Fortunately, the next version of Docusauurs (v3.10) will have a VCS API that lets you provide your own logic for what is the "last updated" metadata of a file.
#11512

This gives the ability to innovate and try to solve the problem in userland. If our community is able to figure out a good solution to this problem using this API, we may be able to merge it back to Docusaurus core.