timestamp stuff, issue 1445

I'm trying to finish 0.30 issues, and #1445 talks about 'svn export'
and 'svn checkout' setting last-commit-timestamps on files.

I don't want to repeat the huge conversation we had on this list about
how timestamps should work; rather, I just want to affirm the
short-term strategy for 1.0. Here's what I remember:

  * Everyone agreed that 'svn export' should set last-commit-times on
    files. That feature was already committed a while back; we're
    simply waiting for httpd-2.0.48 to be released (to get the new APR
    timestamp-setting API).

  * At least one person had a proposal to write a fancy system for
    storing and retrieving mtimes; this was deemed too complex for
    1.0, and put off for discussion as a post-1.0 feature.

  * The issue says that we want 'svn checkout' to set
    last-commit-times, but'svn update' to continue setting now-times,
    as it already does (to ensure that 'make' works correctly).

Greg Hudson tells me (in IRC) that the last point is an incorrect
memory of a consensus, that we never agreed to make 'svn checkout' set
commit-times. He and Philip didn't want their working copies to be a
weird mixture of commit-times and now-times.

However, Greg did seem amenable to having a run-time option (in
~/.subversion/config) that causes checkouts to either always use
now-times or always use commit-times.

I've almost finished a patch which makes 'svn checkout' set
commit-times, but not 'svn update'. I can easily add a config option
to toggle the behavior of 'svn checkout'. Is that acceptable to most
developers?

In summary, once I commit this change, the behavior will be:

   * 'svn export' always sets commit-times
   * 'svn update' always sets now-times
   * 'svn checkout' can behave either way, based on config variable.

Speak now, good developers.

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Received on Fri Sep 5 00:56:26 2003