export: show 'Date' header in a format that also is readable for humans 'export' is the official export format and used by patchbomb, but it would only show date as a timestamp that most humans might find it hard to relate to. It would be very convenient when reviewing a patch to be able to see what timestamp the patch will end up with. Mercurial has always used util.parsedate for parsing these headers. It can handle 'all' date formats, so we could just as well use a readable one. 'export' will now use the format used by 'log' - which is the format described as 'Unix date format' in the templating help. We assume that all parsers of '# HG changeset patch'es can handle that.

--- a/tests/test-import.t	Sun Feb 10 18:26:04 2013 +0100
+++ b/tests/test-import.t	Fri Feb 08 22:54:17 2013 +0100
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
   $ hg --cwd b import ../exported-tip.patch
   applying ../exported-tip.patch
 
-message and committer should be same
+message and committer and date should be same
 
   $ hg --cwd b tip
   changeset:   1:1d4bd90af0e4
@@ -853,6 +853,7 @@
   # HG changeset patch
   # User User B
   # Date 0 0
+  #      Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
   # Node ID eb56ab91903632294ac504838508cb370c0901d2
   # Parent  0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
   from: tricky!