Re: git send-email sets date

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Michal Suchánek <msuchanek@suse.de> writes:

> git send-email sets the message date to author date.
>
> This is wrong because the message will most likely not get delivered
> when the author date differs from current time. It might give slightly
> better results with commit date instead of author date but can't is
> just skip that header and leave it to the mailer?
>
> It does not even seem to have an option to suppress adding the date
> header.

I think you are complaining about output from "git format-patch",
and the reason why the date header is recorded in the output is as
others already mentioned in this thread.

The complaint about "delivery" is misplaced because that date is not
used to drive the SMTP conversation in any way.  "git send-email"
does create its own timestamp, but that is based on the current time
and does not have anything to do with the author or committer date
of the original commit the patch message came from.  

I think we confused end-users like you by allowing the command to
drive "git format-patch" from the command line (and worse, somehow
appearing to encourage such use), which probably was a UI mistake.
We should encourage people to run two commands separately instead,
which incidentally will allow the patch messages to be proofread for
the last time before they are sent out, but also reduce this
confusion when users see that these dates from the author timestamp
are not used in the "Date:" header of received e-mails.