RE: Re: preserve modification date on co?

First, I was thinking about the initial import into Subversion. It is
nice to preserve the initial modification times. It's important meta
information and belies the history of the file outside of Subversion.

Although you may be right that you commit a file soon after you modify
it, what if you are modifying a group of files - and they all must work
together before you do a commit. You may edit the first file on a
Monday, and the last file on a Friday, and then do a commit. It would be
nice to save/restore that information to differentiate between when the
file was last edited and when it was last committed.

Some diff tools (by default) assume that two files are different if one
of them has a newer time stamp - even if their contents are identical.
For example, I use Beyond Compare. I realize that at least for that
tool, I can tell it to ignore file time stamps. I'd rather not have to
do that - because usually they are indicative of different files or more
recent updates (rather than automatic update/restore via Subversion).

Obviously, preserving file (modification) time stamps isn't critical -
Subversion has survived for a long time without them; however, I believe
that they are very important meta information to save/restore which
would assuage many users like myself.

When you check something in and you or someone else checks that out -
you expect to get back the same thing.
Internally - they are the same thing. It would be nice if they also
appeared to be the same externally (i.e. if they had the same time
stamp).

Thanks,
Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: Lee Merrill [mailto:LeeMerrill@bustech.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 4:26 PM
Cc: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: preserve modification date on co?

Hi everyone,
    But I think "check-in time" is virtually the same as modification
time, though. The user could have modified the file 1 second before
committing it, or 100 seconds, but I don't see why this history needs to

be preserved. Especially for users checking out these changes, that
history is unimportant, and "check-in time" is all that is needed, as
far as I can tell.

I'm not sure what you mean about modification time being beneficial in
comparing files and directories, though, it seems diff is what you
really want to use, and if the timestamps differ, it still doesn't
matter...

Lee

>There are at least two problems with not saving (and giving the option
>to restore) modification time as meta data:
>
>1) Information (when the file was last modified) is lost
>2) It makes it more difficult to compare files and directories
>
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
+=========================================================
+ Lee Merrill    lee@bustech.com    919-866-2008
+=========================================================
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