Re: [PATCH] Accept dates before 2000/01/01 when specified as seconds since the epoch

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]

?