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Re: file date in the repository

From: Scott Palmer <scott.palmer_at_2connected.org>
Date: 2005-01-18 16:05:54 CET

On Jan 17, 2005, at 5:09 PM, Marius Gedminas wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 10:24:52PM +0100, Peter Valdemar Mørch wrote:
>>
>> There have been numerous threads about this in the past. The "winning
>> side"'s argument is that newly checked out files need to be
>> timestamped
>> "now" regardless of when they really were created, because otherwise
>> make systems (the assumed most common usage) get confused. The
>> "loosing
>> side"'s arguments, well, who can remember them? :-D

I've argued the point before, as have several others. I don't recall
'losing' as much as the Subversion developer's simply wouldn't
acknowledge the point - claiming (with an amazing bit of ridiculous
circular reasoning) that timestamps shouldn't be relied on because some
things don't preserve them, so Subversion isn't going to preserve them.

> There's also
>
> [miscellany]
> ### Set use-commit-times to make checkout/update/switch/revert
> ### put last-committed timestamps on every file touched.
> use-commit-times = yes
>
> in ~/.subversion/config
>
> And it does confuse make, as I've had the chance to discover today. ;-)
>

I find it odd that the argument against preserving important meta data
comes down to the fact that a build tool such as make can get confused,
so everyone must suffer to make up for it. A simple option to preserve
the timestamp using a property much like svn:executable makes sense.
Btw, sv:executable seems to always do the wrong thing on Windows which
doesn't have an executable property in the native file system resulting
in svn:executable being set for every file.

The lack of this feature seems short sighted.. For similar reasons as
'make' needs to have the timestamp bumped, other tools might want it
preserved. There is a reason that all modern filesystems store such
meta data! You implemented preserving of the 'executable' property
that isn't even stored by some of the filesystems that Subversion runs
on. Surely there is some justification for preserving properties that
are common to all the filesystems.

Is there an existing feature request for something along the lines of
svn:date or svn:modtime?

Scott

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Received on Tue Jan 18 16:08:31 2005

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