On Jan 18, 2005, at 10:53 AM, Dale Worley wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Palmer [mailto:scott.palmer@2connected.org]
>
> claiming (with an amazing bit of ridiculous
> circular reasoning) that timestamps shouldn't be relied on because some
> things don't preserve them, so Subversion isn't going to preserve them.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> More exactly, they live in a world where *many* things don't preserve
> timestamps, so nobody writes tools that rely on them. In that
> environment,
> getting Subversion to preserve timestamps gains the users little,
> because no
> tool depends on them. And if Subversion preserved timestamps, still
> nobody
> would write tools that depended on them.
>
> But there is another world -- a world where most tools preserve
> timestamps.
> And many tools depend on them. And you live in that world.
I guess it is true, I don't encounter many things that don't preserve
timestamps. Other than the tools that modify the file in the first
place, I copy the file from one place to another and the timestamp goes
with it in all the cases that matter to me. Losing a timestamp is the
exception to the rule.
So back to the point, is there any reason that Subversion should
support both worlds? I don't think anyone on the side of preserving
timestamps is arguing against the fact that intentionally changing the
timestamp has merit in many cases, such as not breaking 'make'. But
that is quite clearly an intentional munging of the timestamp metadata
for a particular purpose.
It seems clear to me that "things that don't preserve timestamps" cause
a problem that results in "nobody writes tools that rely on them".
Given that the entire reason for not writing tools that rely on
timestamps is because other tools messed up and didn't preserve them
(which is sort of funny here, because one of the major arguments for
modifying the timestamp is to be compatible with a tool, namely 'make',
specifically because it relies on timestamps), it seems only logical
that now that the problem is recognized the mistake would be avoided.
Scott
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Received on Tue Jan 18 17:53:45 2005