From: Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 05:09:52 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Accept dates before 2000/01/01 when specified as seconds since the epoch
Message-ID: <46679320.6000309@vilain.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vtztl5vvb.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> I vaguely recall hitting the same issue soon after date.c was
> done, and sending in a patch in the same spirit but with
> different implementation (I essentially duplicated that "seconds
> since epoch" without any cutoff as the last ditch fallback) long
> time ago (this was before I took git over; the patch was rejected).
> 
> It almost makes me wonder if it is better to introduce a special
> syntax to denote "seconds since epoch plus timezone offset" for
> our Porcelain use, instead of keeping this arbitrary cut-off
> date which nobody can agree on and which forces us to roll back
> from time to time.  For one thing, such a syntax would allow us
> to talk about a timestamp before the epoch.
> 
> Perhaps
> 
> 	"epoch" [-+] [0-9]+ " " [-+][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]

Probably a good idea, though it would break cg-admin-rewritehist.  I had
to make a similar change when working with the Perl history.  Perhaps
allow both?

There is a 10 digit ISO forms (YYYYMMDDHH) and a 9 digit form
(YYYYDDDHH), but these are very rare :)

Sam.