[RFC/PATCH 0/2] Commits with ancient timestamps

Result of conversion of ancient history from other SCMs, and output from other third-party tools, can record timestamps that predates inception of Git. They can cause "git am", "git rebase" and "git commit --amend" to misbehave, because the raw git timestamp e.g.

	author <a.u.thor@example.com> 1328214896 -0800

are read from the commit object and passed to parse_date() machinery, which rejects raw git timestamps without sufficient number of digits to avoid misinterpreting human-written timestamp in other formats, and timestamps before 1975 do not have enough number of digits in them.

Here is a two-patch series that may improve the situation.

Note that this is not meant for direct application, unless somebody uses this extensively to make sure there is no regression.

Junio C Hamano (2):
  parse_date(): allow ancient timestamps in in-header format
  parse_date(): '@' prefix forces git-timestamp interpretation

 date.c          |   30 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 git-sh-setup.sh |    2 +-
 2 files changed, 31 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)