On 29 Nov 2004 Patrick Smears wrote:
> > What I want is for the file system timestamp to reflect the time I
> > changed the file with the editor, not the time it was checked in or
> > out, or when the directory it's in was renamed. In other words, when I
> > check out a file I want it to have the same filesystem timestamp it had
> > when I committed that revision. Can I do this with Subversion?
>
> No, that is not currently possible with just subversion (although it's
> possible using, for example, scripts that make use of properties to store
> the relevant times).
Hmmm, OK, not the answer I wanted but I'll look in the book to see if I
can sort this out, and come back if I can't. Thanks.
> The reason for the default behaviour is that any other behaviour tends to
> confuse utilities like 'make' that depend on timestamps on files to
> determine which file has been changed most recently (e.g. if someone else
> commits a change to a file, then I do a 'make', then I update my WC to
> pull in their change - I want the changed file to have the time of my
> update, not the time of their commit or the time they changed the file, or
> else 'make' won't know to rebuild targets that depended on the changed
> file...). Since 'make'-like build systems are a very common use case for
> Subversion, this is what the developers have implemented.
Fair enough. The approach you described makes a lot of sense for a
multiprogrammer C project. BUT the exact same requirement -- using
timestamps to drive utilities that determine what files have been
changed -- argues for the opposite approach when the code is not
compiled and deployment uses the timestamps on the source code. In the
projects for which I need Subversion right now, the code is all
interpreted (PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and is deployed to the web.
The deployment uses timestamps to determine what has changed since the
last time the web server was updated.
I can see that if original timestamps that show "last modification" are
preserved it breaks the make utilities -- but if they are not, it
breaks timestamp-based deployment utilities for code that doesn't need
a make step.
It's too bad there's no way to select this as an option -- it appears
that it's going to make my use of Subversion a lot more difficult.
--
Tom
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Received on Tue Nov 30 02:44:51 2004