The merge commits made by Linus will have as their date and time the time when he made the merge locally on his own machine, which can be different from the tim

The merge commits made by Linus will have as their date and time the time when he made the merge locally on his own machine, which can be different from the time that he pushed those changes out (and given that he specifically designed git to have this capability it seems rather plausible that he uses it). Merge commits are really the same as non-merge commits. The only difference is the number of parent commits, which is irrelevant for this discussion.