Can the automatic daily update commits be stopped?

[David Howells]

Can the automatic "daily update" and "Automatic date update in version.in"
commits be stopped?  Or at least only performed if the last commit was not
itself such a commit?

As far as I can see, the upsides are:

 (*) Makes CVS easier to manage.

 (*) Daily tarball/patch releases can be made from the daily update commits.

and the downsides are:

 (*) The information displayed by git fetch can't be used tell if there've
     been any changes since yesterday since there has always been at least one
     insignificant automatic change since yesterday.

 (*) Reduces overall git efficiency.

 (*) Increases the likelyhood of getting a hash collision in the git repo.

 (*) Gives git bisect more steps to go through (granted this only increases
     with log2 of N).

 (*) Severely reduces the amount of useful information that can be displayed
     in UIs such as gitweb.

     Take a look at:

	http://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/binutils-2_24-branch

     for example.  Only 7 actual changes are visible on the first page.  93
     "daily update" messages are visible, however.

Would it be possible instead to ask people to make use of the git commit ID
rather than the version date as a reference?  Especially as there can be
multiple changes per date...

Thanks,
David