I have a GitHub Actions Workflow that clones the repo, renders the content, then pushes it up to the gh-pages branch to be published. However, the ordering of the field notes was dependent on the file modification timestamps. I imagine workflows that use Make will also be affected by this issue.

I needed a solution that restored the modification timestamps after the repo is cloned. I chanced upon git-tools which contained a utility called git-restore-mtime that served this purpose perfectly.

To achieve this, I added a step to install and execute after cloning. Additionally, the whole history needs to be cloned by setting fetch-depth to 0 for the actions/checkout action.1

- name: Check out repository
  uses: actions/checkout@v2
  with: 
    fetch-depth: 0

- name: Restore modification timestamps 
  run: sudo apt-get install -y git-restore-mtime && git restore-mtime

Note that this requires git and a modern python version. GitHub Actions does come with Python pre-installed, so this works well.

  1. I presume that the modification times are taken from the git log, but I may be mistaken. ↩︎