On Aug 29, 2006, at 08:20, Andrew Webb wrote:
> Speaking generally, I feel that any system that stores or transmits or
> otherwise deals with files should honour the contract of last-modified
> times. I.e. the time on a file should be the last time its contents
> were changed. The fact that I can import files into SVN and then
> export them and lose that information seems wrong and unnecessary.
> To be honest it's created a bad first impression, and I will have to
> check with colleagues that this is lack is OK and that we all still
> want to go ahead with Subversion. In all other aspects Subversion
> seems excellent, and lives up to its glowing reputation.
Well, there is the unofficial "text-time" branch of Subversion which
does maintain this information. If maintaining this metadata is very
important to you, you may want to build this branch of Subversion and
use it instead of the official distribution.
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/branches/meta-data-versioning/
FWIW, I don't think the current Subversion behavior was created by
accident or is considered a missing feature. Rather, I think it's
intentional, to enable people to work with Makefiles in the standard
way. I'm not sure I can explain it entirely correctly because I don't
write compiled software, but IIRC, Makefiles rely on last modified
dates, and won't compile something unless it's newer than the last
time that thing was compiled. Updating a working copy and getting
files that aren't modified "now", therefore, causes problems getting
all the new bits compiled properly.
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Received on Tue Aug 29 14:17:41 2006