Re: strange date generated by git-format-patch

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Feb 24, 2007, 09:30 UTC
Message-ID: <7vodnjzyvq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0702231558170.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

>> That is just a fake random date to make the Unix-From line recognizable 
>> by common MUA and does not have anything to do with your commit objects.
>
> So how about this:

Show 6 quoted lines

> @@ -174,7 +174,7 @@ void show_log(struct rev_info *opt, const char *sep)
>  		else
>  			subject = "Subject: ";
>  
> -		printf("From %s Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001\n", sha1);
> +		printf("From %s %s\n", sha1, show_date(time(NULL), 0, 0));

I actually once tried to change it to git's birthday (Thu Apr 7 15:13:13 2005 -0700) and I recall that it turned out that some people's scripts (or perhaps MUA) were broken and cared what was before "7" (nothing, as show_date() does, " " to align to two columns per date, "0" to zero-pad align) on the Unix-From line and discarded that update.

I do not think it is worth changing it. Who's hurting with the current behaviour? In other words, is it broken? Unix-From lines are there only to separate each piece of e-mail in the mbox and otherwise is not used. send-email, am, nor imap-send should care anything beyond the leading "From ", and mailsplit validates only that what's around the last colon near the end of line looks like time and year.