Looking through the github API, the PushEvents category includes a list of commits and a github assigned time when the event happened. The PushEvent description documentation claims the attribute commits[][distinct] indicates
Whether this commit is distinct from any that have been pushed before.
This would suggest there is only one event entry where a commit is marked with the 'distinct' flag set to True as the earliest time Github saw them, and that such event would have the earliest timestamp compared to any other event that also has that commit.
However, I have found that some commits get marked 'distinct' in multiple different push event notifications, and that commits flagged with 'distinct' = False may actually show up in earlier events than those events where they were marked 'True'.
Why is that? am I misunderstanding the meaning of the 'distinct' flag?