From: Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:53:32 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/2] Commits with ancient timestamps
Message-ID: <CAFQ2z_Nb-3gai8aXRv+03N0YrAYOJ_sDPn+jruGCvYkTQAr-Pg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1328218903-5681-1-git-send-email-gitster@pobox.com>

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 7:41 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> 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,

As a bit of context: we have some internal tools at Google that create
administrative commits that should have no timestamp.  I am using "0"
and "1" as a deterministic timestamps in these cases (ie. the start of
the epoch). While this works well in general, there are some git
subcommands that barf on this, causing user-unhappiness.

This patch will hopefully resolve these breakages.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys
Google Engineering Belo Horizonte
hanwen@google.com