Re: format-patch: "magic" mbox timestamp

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

The original magic timestamp, however, was the one I reintroduced, and as
you can see from the part I quoted above, I only imitated the original
script.

That's almost a lifetime ago that I totally forgot that it was
original a shell script.  

It indeed does this:

+	case "$mbox" in
+	t)
+	    echo 'From nobody Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001' ;# UNIX "From" line
+	    mailScript="$mailScript"'
+	    s|^|Subject: [PATCH'"$num"'] |'
+	    ;;

which clearly shows that "nobody" was chosen to mimic a real mailbox
(i.e. unlike what Brandon said in the other message, the <mailbox>
may not have "@" <domain> after <local-part>).

In any case, I think what's more important is after 15 years, if any
implementation of the /etc/magic database actually take advantage of
that magic date as the "magic" signal to identify a format-patch
output.  Despite the wishes of original authors and designers of Git
and its format-patch output, perhaps no /etc/magic author noticed it,
in which case it is safe to use other randomly picked dates, or the
timestamp of underlying commits.  Otherwise, changing the "magic"
timestamp would introduce a needless regression.