[PATCH 1 of 2 v2] Allow commit date before Unix epoch

[Pierre-Yves David]

On 04/01/2016 05:55 PM, Florent Gallaire wrote:
> # HG changeset patch
> # User Florent Gallaire <fgallaire at gmail.com>
> # Date 1459212616 -7200
> #      Tue Mar 29 02:50:16 2016 +0200
> # Node ID 8152e614ee77606b3e26f8935ded4157b4caa86c
> # Parent  ff0d3b6b287f89594bd8d0308fe2810d2a18ea01
> date: allow negative timestamp
>
> DVCS are very useful to store various texts (as legislation) written before
> Unix epoch. Fri, 13 Dec 1901 is a nice gain over Thu, 01 Jan 1970.

Hi there,

We would be happy to get the ability to use negative timestamps back 
into Mercurial, thanks for looking into it. (I double checked with Matt 
Mackall, there is no sea monster hiding under the bed that would awaken 
if we get that back.)

However, there some things we need to fix in this series:

1) We'll want your second patch, the one with an alternative fix for 
issue2513 to be the first one so that we don't regress in the middle of 
the series. This is useful for bisecting and also give us the ability to 
partially accept series if some parts needs reword.
(note that I've not reviewed this patch 2 in details yet and it might 
need changes, from a quick glance we'll want a larger description of the 
changeset to explain what is happening and why it is correct)

2) Actually most people missed your patch 2 because your did not used 
patchbomb or the pushgate to send your patch. See our wiki for details 
about how to send you series as a consistent group:

  https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges#Emailing_patches

3) We'll want some tests. If you are to allow a new range of value, we 
want to make sure it is properly recorded and displayed. Ideally, you 
would run theses new tests both on unix* and windows, but if you don't 
have access to a windows machine, this is fine.

Thanks for looking into that and sorry for there bumpy reviews. Your 
patch seems to raise a lot of attention.

-- 
Pierre-Yves David