Re: Date handling.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Apr 14, 2005, 09:00 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504140153230.7211@ppc970.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <1113466592.12012.192.camel@baythorne.infradead.org>

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, David Woodhouse wrote:

> 
> I see two possible solutions:
> 	1. Just store seconds-since-GMT-epoch and if we really want, the
> 	   timezone as auxiliary information.

Yeah, I think this is the right thing to do. I can change "commit" to do it.

I used to think that the date was purely a "enforced comment" (like the committer info is, as far as git is concerned), which is why I used the simple textual representation. But yes, when I wrote that "rev-tree" thing I did curse that and consider just changing it.

It's still just technically a "hint", since time isn't synchronized in any way (and in a distributed system, time _cannot_ be synchronized). But it's a useful hint, so ..

> 	2. Store dates in RFC2822 form.
> 
> Unless someone convincingly expresses a preference before I get to work
> and start playing with it, I'll implement the latter.

I do like text output, but if it is painful, the "unix seconds" format is certainly a hell of a lot simpler. And quite frankly, if we change it, we might as well just change it all the way. So I'd almost prefer (1).

But "He who does the work gets to choose the implementation". And I do agree that this is a bad format decision, and that we should change it. It shouldn't even be that painful. Only "rev-tree" cares, and even rev-tree doesn't care _that_ deeply.

		Linus