From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:01:55 GMT
Subject: Re: Date handling.
Message-ID: <425EDA43.3040404@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <1113512078.12012.227.camel@baythorne.infradead.org>

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 12:42 -0700, Luck, Tony wrote:
> 
>>This is a very good point ... but this still has problems with the
>>"git is a filesystem, not a SCM" mantra.  Timezone comments don't
>>belong in the git inode.
> 
> Yeah, but really I'd want to see other serious users of it before I'd
> accept that the timezone information _really_ needs to be stored
> separately. After all, the committer and author information really
> wouldn't be considered part of the _filesystem_ either.
> 

Both of these are metadata; they may not be directly relevant to the 
filesystem, but are attributes relevant to the client thereof; 
effectively an xattr.  It's not really any different than the fact that 
RFC 2822-style messages frequently contain headers rarely used by either 
MTAs or MUAs; they're metadata provided along the standard format for 
metadata in that system.  In fact, the ability for RFC (2)822 to 
accommodate this type of data has shown to be a major strength of the 
system, as opposed to the uncountably many attempts at binary email formats.

	-hpa