From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 06:11:19 GMT Subject: Re: git-format-patch Date header Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <43C12DE9.8010906@op5.se> On Sun, 8 Jan 2006, Andreas Ericsson wrote: > > Actually, that's what's printed in the commit message, so any change > would have to be put there and that would break backwards compatibility > for new tools that might want to use it. No, git should always take the date in any of a million different formats, and always turn it into "seconds + timezone" internally. The fact that git-format-patch also prints it out in the internal format is unambiguous (nice) but human-unreadable (bad). There are other unambiguous formats it could use, notably standard rfc2822 format ("date -R"). The git "show_date()" function hopefully does exactly that rfc2822 format, but you'd have to make a helper program to do the conversion in git-format-patch.sh. Linus