Re: [PATCH 2/2] commit: use a priority queue in merge base functions

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

The script originally comes from here:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/33566/focus=33852

and the discussion implies that the AUTHOR_DATEs were added to avoid a
race condition with the timestamps. But why would that ever have worked?

I do not see how AUTHOR_DATE would affect anything there, either,
other than to give reprodusible object names.  The test only sets
committer-date upfront, so without setting author-date, you would
still get different object names on commits.  Which suggests me that
there may be something that tiebreaks based on object names?