Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schinde...@gmx.de> writes: >> Does the "gitgitgadget" thing lie on the Date: e-mail header? > > No, GitGitGadget takes the literal output from `git format-patch`, as far > as I can tell. So if at all, it is `format-patch` that is lying.
format-patch faithfully records the fact about the commit that is made into the patch. How pieces of information should (or should not) be used depends on the purpose of the application that uses its output. I'd suggest to match what send-email does, which is to notice but use the current date when adding a Date: header. An option to lie to SMTP servers may be OK but I do not think we want to encourage such a behaviour by making it the default. What is missing in the core-git tools is an ability to tell send-email to optionaly add an in-body header to record the author date of the original. We add an in-body header that records the real author when it is different from the sender automatically, and it is OK to have an option to allow doing so (but not encouraged around here---it is easier to reason about the resulting history for everybody, perhaps other than the original author, to record the first time you show the change to the public as the author time).
