See also the US Constitution in GitHub: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution
Nice. I kinda wish they went all the way and modified the commit details to have the actual authoring dates for each amendment/etc. Anyone know how well git plays with pre-epoch timestamps?
I just poked around a bit.
So git was first created with u32 time in mind only. However because of the looming year-2038 problem, they are working on expanding that.
Apparently git internals are almost ready to support more interesting timestamps. However, much of the git tooling and UI (like command line parsing and output) refuses to deal with pre-epoch timestamps.
I briefly tried with git 'porcelain' and also via libgit2, but it's all a bit annoying.
In summary, I think you'd need to hack up at least some of git's tooling to make everything work, but it wouldn't be heart surgery, because the internals are already nearly ready for this kind of change.
Things get ugly if you go back far enough that you need to account for jurisdictions which no longer exist switching between calendars at different times from one another. I don't know how well Unix timestamps will fare for dates prior to approximately the 1600s.
At least you won't need to worry about figuring out historical leap seconds.
> Things get ugly if you go back far enough that you need to account for jurisdictions which no longer exist switching between calendars at different times from one another.
I think that would be a 'timezone' conversion you do at display time. Internally, it's still stored as a unix timestamp.
> how well git plays with pre-epoch timestamps?
Tangentially, most RSS readers don't play nicely. A lot of webtooling doesn't like featuring e.g. old poetry etc. with the actual dates e.g.: https://alexalejandre.com/poetry/ I got a few e.g. newsboat to update their handling though.