Support exposing revision time alongside revision sha (when using git)

[G-Rath]

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A while ago we had a request from a client that we have a light-weight "versioning" field in the admin panel of their app so they could check if there had been a new deployment - since we use continuous integration and deploy to autoblanced servers we couldn't use the release time as that is effectively arbitrary and not consistent (e.g. if we don't deploy for two weeks and a server is reprovisioned, it'll have a very different release time to the other servers), so to facilitate this we implemented a REVISION_TIME file into our Capistrano deployment which works pretty much exactly how the existing REVISION file does, just with Time™.

We saw this as useful to have in general so landed it in our rails-template (ackama/rails-template#461) and have ported it to a number of our apps without issue.

This is something that feels like a useful and cheap win to be worth having upstreamed into Capistrano itself, especially since most of the code in that PR is just copied from what already exists in Capistrano since (afaik) there's no way to hook in any "closer".

[mattbrictson]

I agree, this has been a feature I've bolted onto capistrano in the app templates and tools I've created over the years.

I don't have much bandwidth to build this into capistrano right now, but I'd be willing to review a PR, if you are interested in contributing.

[G-Rath]

Cool, yup I'm happy to have a crack at it - I'll try to do that over the next week or so

[G-Rath]

@mattbrictson have opened #2155 which should hopefully be pretty close to done, but either way needs some review for me to continue 🙂