Feature proposal: maintain timestamps on svn hotcopy

I am trying to get my company over to svn (from SCCS -- yuck). Part
of the fun is folding in the svn repository over to our backup process.

We currently do a full backup on Sunday, and incremental backups
(based on what changed since Sunday) throughout the following
week.

The problem is that when I do I hotcopy of the repos, none of the
original timestamps (ctime, mtime) are saved. This causes the
incremental backup of the hotcopy to be the same as the full backup,
which defeats the purpose of having an incremental/full backup
routine in the first place.

I've been going over the code in libsvn_subr/io.c and am
considering modifying svn_io_copy_file to take an extra boolean
flag (copy_times). By default, this behavior would be turned off
on all callers of that function EXCEPT for the codepath that gets
triggered when the user runs "svnadmin hotcopy --preserve-times",
or somesuch. This would keep the code change impact down,
as well.

My questions are: a) when doing this patch, what do I need to
look out for? and b) is there a reason this isn't done now (i.e.
does it screw with assumptions made during design)?
Furthermore, is there an existing unit test for this function, or is
to me to come up with one?

Let me know before I start tilting at windmills. :)

--sgp

-- 
scott parkerson. geek, erstwhile prophet and fool.
just a cog in the machinery: http://www.smerpology.org/sprocket/
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