Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] hideTimezone: add a user.hideTimezone config

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 17:05:51 -0700

Shengfa Lin <[email-masked]> writes:

I won't repeat what I said in the other review message, but since I
forgot to comment on the log message...

> Users requested hiding location in the world from source control
> trail. This is an implementation to read user.hideTimezone in
> cmd_commit and set timezone to UTC if it's true.
>
> Added a brief explanation of the new field in Documentation
> and added tests for true/false and reset-author

Not a very good proposed log message, that sounds as if "it is
what 'Users' requested, so it must be a worthwhile thing to do",
which is not the line of thinking to go by.

The convention we follow in the commit log messages is to:

 - first explain that the current system does not do X (in present
   tense, so we do NOT say "previously we did not do X"), then

 - explain why doing X would be a good thing, and finally

 - give an order to the codebase to start doing X.

Perhaps

    Many places in Git record the timezone of the actor when a
    timestamp is recorded, including the committer and author
    timestamps in a commit object and the tagger timestamp in a tag
    object.  Some people however prefer to "lie" about where they
    actually are.

    They _could_ just say "export TZ=UTC" and be done with it, but
    the method would not easily allow them to pretend to be in the
    UTC timezone only with Git, while revealing their true timezone
    to other activities (e.g. sending e-mail?).

    Introduce user.hideTimeZone configuration variable, which can be
    optionally set to 'true' to pretend to Git as if the user has
    exported environment variable TZ with the value UTC.

Thanks.