When having "Discard branch older than given days" branch filter active, branches which have a HEAD commit that has been first authored a long time ago will be filtered out, even if there are more recent commits on that branch.

The reason seems to be, that AuthorDate is used to determine age, rather than the more appropriate CommitDate.

How to reproduce

Preconditions

• We assume you have a Bitbucket instance with a repo, that is set up to trigger a Jenkins build on branch push
• We assume said Jenkins instance is configured to have "Discard branch older than given days" set to any reasonable value, e.g., 30

Steps

• Create a branch, add a commit and push it to Bitbucket
• Wait for the build to start
• Add a very old commit to the branch by simply git commit -m "Empty" --date "1990-01-01T00:00:00" --allow-empty
• The resulting PR will have something like (use git log --pretty=fuller to see the details):
  • Author:     *redacted*
    AuthorDate: Mon Jan 1 00:00:00 1990 +0100
    Author:     *redacted*
    CommitDate: Wed Apr 9 15:29:11 2025 +0200
• Push the branch

Expected

Build is triggered

Actual

Nothing happens