Jeff King <p...@peff.net> writes: > I do not just agree, but I think the move to a signed timestamp is a big > improvement. Git's object format is happy to represent times before > 1970, but the code is not. I know this has been a pain for people who > import ancient histories into Git. > > It looks from the discussion like the sanest path forward is our own > signed-64bit timestamp_t. That's unfortunate compared to using the > standard time_t, but hopefully it would reduce the number of knobs (like > TIME_T_IS_INT64) in the long run.
Keeping it unsigned is safer in the short-term. There are some places that uses 0 as "impossible time" (e.g. somebody tried to parse a string as time and returns a failure) and these places need to be found and be replaced with probably the most negative value that timestamp_t cn represent. Another possible special value we may use is for "expiring everything" but I think we tend to just use the timestamp of the present time for that purpose and not UONG_MAX, so we should be OK there. But we need to cross the bridge to signed timestamp sometime, and I do not see any reason why that somtime should not be now.
