Re: Status of meta-data-versioning (mod time)?

On Tuesday 12 July 2005 14:49, Branko Čibej wrote:

> > - 'make' uses them. If the right order is preserved,
> ..
> I've heard this argument many times, and it's simply *wrong*. Imagine
> this scenario:
>
>     * update to HEAD
>     * make clean all
>     * update to some older revision
>     * make all

Well, I guess your scenario contains a mistake:

    * update to some older revision
    * make clean all

will funcion as intended, provided you makefiles are correct. Given that
downgrading a WC is not done frequently, 'make clean all' is not a big deal.

Make is not a panacea, but in this case one can use make to get reliable
results.

> If you preserve commit times in the WC, then after the update to an
> older revision, some files that need rebuilding will have changed, but
> make won't notice because their timestamps would be older than the
> timestamps of the generated files left over from the previous build.
> Such an update would force you ro do a clean rebuild, and that's not nice.
>
> The argument assumes that generated files are under version control,
> too, but that's usually not the case.

This depends on the working style and on te working setup. I do admit that in
many _software development_ projects only sources are kept in the repository,
updates are often, and chekout times are just the right thing.

What makes a difference are projects that need to version generated files, or
that need to preserve true modification times for some reason.

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Saulius Gražulis
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