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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

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

> > 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