Re: Status of meta-data-versioning (mod time)?

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

> > In their world, every project seems to be started under version
> > control. Well, that's not the real world.
>
> Not true at all. Rather, we expect that 90% of the time, projects
> will be 'svn import'ed into subversion.

in which state/age? My "embedded" industrial applications are rather
long-lived, stuff from 1993 (long before I thought about using
version control) is still maintained.

IMHO the timestamp is a rather meaningful property if there is no
equivalent information in the revision log.

Well, with a small script I can (and will) add/commit each file at a
time and tweak the commit time, this way the project history keeps
similar information as if being under version control from the
beginning. But it's a rather ugly (and slooow) hack.

> Once the project is in subversion's repository, tell me why you still
> care about the original timestamps. I'd like to know. The answer I

People gave already many reasons in past threads, for example
handling files not being source text, files from external sources.

Another reason: As long as there is any connection to the "pre-svn"
status of the project, the timestamp is a important indicator or
helpful to find the connection.

For example, there might be more than one version (branch) from "pre-
svn" ages, those files can be identified/compared by their timestamp.

After modifying a file the first time under version control, the
original timestamp is usually (!) no more important, since commit
time is as good as mtime in most (not necessarily all) cases.

I also agree with others that svn should be able to "touch" the
affected local files on commit so that the working copy has the same
timestamp as the commited revision. This would cause "make" to
compile the files again (as it would happen using substitutions), but
one had at least identical working copies (if using use-commit-
times).

> always hear is, "I have a whole bunch of scripts that depend on
> timestamps to perform copy synchronizations!"... to which I'm not
> sympathetic.

Situations where this is really important may be rare but existing
(files from external sources).

Oliver

-- 
Oliver Betz, Muenchen
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