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Re: Subversion, binary files, hex editors and file modification time

From: Hyrum K. Wright <hyrum_wright_at_mail.utexas.edu>
Date: 2007-06-11 17:30:52 CEST

Oliver Paulus wrote:
>> Why is the hex editor behaving badly? If it changes the file, the
>> modification time should be changed too.
> I do not know why - but there are some programs (hex editors) with this
> behaviour.
>
>> Because reading the entire file would be much, much slower.
> I know but my problem is that the users have a modified version of the file
> within the working copy which cannot be commited to the repository AND the
> users do not know that they have changed it. They believe that they have
> the
> "not modified" version from the repository.

In short, your tool does not changed the modified time, even though it
modifies the file. Some would call such a tool broken.

This has been discussed ad nauseum before. You may be interested in
this mail (and the surrounding thread):
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2007-03/0734.shtml

Also, take a look at issue 2746:
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2746

As part of the solution to issue 2746, Erik added the ability to use
file size as an additional indicator of modification. So, if you change
the size of the file, but not the modified time, Subversion will be
smart enough to know that the file was modified. IIRC, this has not
been backported to the 1.4.x line, and will appear in Subversion 1.5.

-Hyrum

Received on Mon Jun 11 17:52:27 2007

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