At Ben's prompting I would like to discuss issue # 1256 - Having the
ability to maintain the exact modified date/times for files when they
are checked in and out off a Subversion repository.
I don't particularly like the proposed property name "svn:text-time",
since I want this feature mainly for non-text files. But it on looking
at the patch (I'm NOT familiar with any of the subversion code) it
seems that 'text' is referring to the file data, as opposed to the
subversion properties set on the file. (e.g. 'text' changes are changes
to the data content of the versioned resource, 'prop' changes are
changes to subversions metadata (versioned properties) for the
resource. Right?
Related to the above, I also think it is important that this can be
configured on a file-by-file basis.. I might want source code to work
the usual way, but image files to retain their modification time, for
example.
Here's an excerpt from the the thread that prompted my post...
(Btw.. Why does 'previous in thread' often fail to go to the correct
message when viewing the list archives?)
(thread begins here:
http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=92595)
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@collab.net>
> Date: February 22, 2005 11:36:49 AM EST
> To: Scott Palmer <scott.palmer@2connected.org>
> Cc: "'subversion' Users" <users@subversion.tigris.org>
> Subject: Re: Feature request: Keep file dates
>
>
> On Feb 22, 2005, at 10:22 AM, Scott Palmer wrote:
>>
>> The use-case that comes up here is for .pdf files or other content
>> generated by non-programmers who do not directly use subversion.
>> They hand a file over to the engineering team to incorporate into a
>> build. On their own computers they have their own organization of
>> the files and talk in terms of when they last updated the file, not
>> when the engineering team decided to commit it to subversion. When I
>> have to answer something along the lines of, "Did you get the changes
>> I made last Thursday?" I can't go by the commit time that shows the
>> following Monday because that isn't a strong enough indicator that I
>> have Thursday's changes. Maybe I got an update on Wednesday and
>> that's what I committed. If the timestamp (and size, etc.) matched
>> exactly with the file that the creator has, I'm pretty confident that
>> we are talking about the same thing.
>
> Wow, that's really clear. Thanks for that explanation and example.
> Maybe you should come persuade folks over on dev@ to increase the
> priority and work out the implementation of this feature.
>
> There's already an issue #1256 patch, but it needs a lot more
> attention and discussion. (I'm tied up working on the locking feature
> right now.)
Received on Wed Feb 23 17:47:07 2005