original timestamp preservation

This question keeps coming up, over and over, in both IRC and the
users@ list:

    When I import a project into subversion, why aren't the original
    timestamps being preserved?

A lot of newbies are surprised. Some are frustrated and throw insults
at the project. And to make things worse, the answers they get back
are mixed.

I feel like we're in a state of limbo regarding our "official" project
answer to this question. What I'd really like to do is write a new
FAQ that says either

    * Subversion has no plans to support this feature, here's why.

    * Subversion plans to support this feature someday, here's the
      filed issue.

Sometimes users are told, "hey, go try this branch from p.marek, it
should do what you want". But is that branch really supported? Will
it ever be integrated? My recollection is that at some point we were
in process of trying to squeeze a real design spec for the feature,
but because that never quite happened, the branch is just sitting
there.

Other times, we give users the opposite message. Some of us (like me)
think the feature is unnecessary. Most everyone who complains about
the current behavior is upset because their FTP scripts can't sync
stuff based on timestamps anymore, to which we say: "change your
processes, you should be using 'svn up' to sync things now."

So what I'd really like to do is pull ourselves out of limbo on this
issue. Are we going to file an new-feature issue to develop a real
design spec? Or are we going to give an official explanation as to
why we're not doing the feature? We need to decide.

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Received on Tue Jun 28 19:58:44 2005