On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Walt Armour wrote:
> > I'm not sure what you mean about modification time being beneficial in
> > comparing files and directories, though, it seems diff is what you
> > really want to use, and if the timestamps differ, it still doesn't
> > matter...
>
> I believe this was briefly mentioned in a previous post. In situations
> where a generated file (generation conditional on source file
> modification times) is also kept in SVN it would be very useful to have
> the file timestamps be the actual modification times to facilitate
> proper generation in later checkouts.
I'm not sure it buys you as much as you might want it to...
Suppose you've got a file C, which is compiled from files A & B. (Maybe C
is an executable, and A and B are the source files).
Suppose in my working copy, I edit A, and do a 'make' to generate C. Then
A & C will have times of about now.
Suppose someone else was working on file B last night, and committed some
changes.
Now, I update my workspace. If svn preserves modification times, then B
will have a time sometime last night - older than my C, which I just
recompiled. If I do a 'make', then C will *not* be rebuilt - even though B
has changed. Thus I'm fooled into thinking C is a compiled version of my
source - when in fact it isn't...
I'm not saying that svn shouldn't (have an option to) remember
modification times - just that preserving them by default on checkout and
update can result in subtle problems... granted, it does sometimes mean
that files are recompiled when they don't need to be, but that's far
preferable to having them not recompile when they need it...
Patrick
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Received on Thu Sep 9 23:27:14 2004