Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> 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.
