InfoItem.lastChangedDate is leaky abstraction

I was looking into implementing https://github.com/mojohaus/buildnumber-maven-plugin/pull/16 in a sane way, but had to conclude that InfoItem.lastChangedDate is unfortunately just a string and not a Data, so will leak the console output of different providers to the user.

Does anybody see a sane way to fix this API and create a sane abstraction for different SCMs? If yes, I would try to go ahead with the following tasks:

1. Fix InfoItem, so that lastChangedDate is a Date
2. Fix the current providers filling this field (svnexe and svnjava AFAICS - aside: why is svnjava not part of the maven-scm repository?)
3. Implement this feature for at least gitexe (and maybe jgit) so I can use it for my usecase

Ideas, comments?