From: Joel C. Salomon <joelcsalomon@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:13:54 GMT
Subject: ESR's reposurgeon action stamps
Message-ID: <CAFUtaNFUQ=kF6pktLh9wYx6Nm=c0W-YhX8vpn4SeQ+xOms0UHQ@mail.gmail.com>

Since it's intended as a cross-VCS tool, Eric Raymond’s reposurgeon
does not use hashes to refer to commits, but instead uses “action
stamps”. From <http://www.catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon/reposurgeon.html#reference-lifting>:

> An action stamp is an RFC3339 timestamp, followed by a '!', followed
> by a committer email address, followed by ':' and a 1-origin sequence
> number if the date/time pair is not unique in the repository; it
> refers to a commit without being VCS-specific. Thus, instead of
> "commit 304a53c2" or "r2355", "2011-10-25T15:11:09Z!fred@foonly.com".

Would there be any interest at all in extending the various Git
utilities to understand this style of reference?

—Joel Salomon