It happens very often that your "shooting" date is days or weeks earlier than your "hugin pano creation" date. iPhoto on OSX (but also many other image gallery programs on Linux and Windows) import /sort/ show their images based on file date. If you want to keep your source images and your pano together, it would be great if you could automatically timestamp your pano file date/time to the internal exif date/time (if available).
This can be easily achieved using "ExifTool" (already used by Hugin) and "touch" (available on every MacOSX, *nix and *BSD system. For windows one could use use windows own "touch" (not standard and NOT free, but comes with the toolkits) or one could package (cygwin) "touch", which is GPLed Open Source.
I can't program it in C/C++, but I did program it in applescript for my own ImageFuser application (set enfused image file date/time to internal exif date/time).
It's really simple and I can easily explain the program flow and structure of my functions to a C/C++ programmer.
This could than become a checkbox on the "stitcher" panel: "Set panorama file date to exif date". I think it would complicate the "assistant" panel too much.
Just contact me and we can work it out.
It's easier than that, exiv2 does this timestamp setting, hugin already depends on exiv2 so it wouldn't be difficult to add to the Makefiles, e.g:
exiv2 -T fixme.jpg
(Though you wouldn't want this when stitching on the command-line as `make` looks at timestamps to decide if the output needs to be updated)