resolving ambiguity in action stamps (was: Everyone, please stop making my life more difficult)

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Andreas Schwab <address@hidden>:
> > >> That's pretty easy if you are rebasing.
> > >
> > > Explain?
> > 
> > Rebasing takes only a fraction of a second.
>
> And actually changes the timestamps, which I would not have expected -
> as someone else observed, I would have expected that to move the commits
> wuthout changing the metadata. 
>
> That is unfortunate.  I'd mumble that someone could have pointed this
> out six months ago, but it wouldn't have helped because there's no
> better alternative.
>
> Looking across VCS metadata, the only things you can always get are
> committer name and committer data. Sometimes author name and author
> are available, but it is not even guaranteed that the distinction is
> portable.  It wasn't in darcs last I checked.

Perhaps I should have pointed this out six months ago, but bzr presents
the same issue as git does re: commit timestamps vs. authorship timestamps.

The authorship timestamp is what's displayed by "bzr log" in the
"timestamp:" field; the commit timestamp is the decimal string in the
middle of the revision-id.

I gather that what you've been using thus far in the conversion from bzr
is the *authorship* timestamps, not the commit-timestamps.

Sorry--I mostly just wasn't paying close enough attention six months ago
to point out all of the angles of this issue...; though I *did* raise
this "ambiguity of reference by timestamp" issue at that time--and thought
that you'd given an ACK with a statement you were going to fix it by using
"#{sequence-number}" suffixes to distingiush between multiple distinct
items in the same "{ISO-date}!{email-address}" hashbucket:

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg01117.html

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg01113.html

(that first link is your response; the second is my message--which
 included an example of why the "same timestamps, different commit-
 objects" situation might exist in a repository)

-- 
"'tis an ill wind that blows no minds."