[PATCH 0/4] approxidate for "git commit --date=foo"

On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 06:06:39PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

quoted

I think the original rationale was that it's OK for us to allow some
sloppiness when _viewing_ commits, since you will generally notice the
problem. But when making commits, it's better to be careful, since you
may be setting the sha1 in stone.

These days we have two tools that could help:

  1. approxidate_careful will do a regular approxidate, but keep track
  of whether we found anything even remotely useful. That doesn't mean
  you can't still get unexpected results, but at least some truly
  useless cases return errors.

  2. For commits with a different author and committer, we mention the
  author name in the post-commit summary. We could do the same with a
  timestamp that was given (i.e., mentioning it in a standard format)
  to give the user another opportunity to double-check what we parsed.

I think it would make sense if we followed both of those points.

Here are patches to do so.

  [1/4]: commit: use split_ident_line to compare author/committer
  [2/4]: pretty: make show_ident_date public
  [3/4]: commit: print "Date" line when the user has set date
  [4/4]: commit: accept more date formats for "--date"

-Peff