Re: [PATCH] doc: set actual revdate for manpages

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Forgot to mention another thing. While it may be a good idea to tie the datestamp etched in the formatted result to that of the source material, rather than the date the formatter happened to have been run, the committer date is more appropriate than the author date for that purpose, as the former is the date that the change made on the latter date (which is earlier) has become a part of the whole, from which the formatted result was produced.

It may not make a big practical difference:

 * For an individual who is trying out the changes just made, the
   committer time and the author time are likely identical.

 * For a release process, what is at the tip of the released branch
   is likely be the release notes and version bump, recorded by the
   releaser, and again the committer time and the author time are
   likely identical.

 * For results of a pull request, the times are likely identical for
   the merge commit.

but from the philosophical standpoint, it does matter. Using the committer time would give us one more justification to use one single timestamp from the commit, when people complain "this manual page, as opposed to the other one that was changed in the latest release, has not seen any need to be updated for the past 3 years, yet the formatted output for these two manual pages carry the same date".