Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 8/9] Use uintmax_t for timestamps

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 20:45:37 -0700

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> In any case, it is a question unrelated to the work I performed in this
>> patch series: the raison d'être of these patches is to allow timestamps to
>> refer to dates that are currently insanely far in the future.
>
> Yes, but the job of the maintainer is to prevent narrow-focused
> individual contributors from throwing us into a hole we cannot dig
> out of by closing the door for plausible future enhancements.

Having said that, IIRC, this series does not tighten the existing
code to specifically check for integer wrap-around anyway, so in a
sense, users who use a timestamp that is in an insanely distant
future is already accepting the risk of getting broken in the
future, so my answer to the question I asked is "it would be extra
nice to future-proof people's data, but not doing anything is
probably OK---at least we is not making things worse."