Re: Bug in Subversion regarding file attributes

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 11:03 AM, David Weintraub <qazwart_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> What Subversion does is look at the timestamp of the file and the
> contents of the .svn directory that contains the file information. If
> the timestamp has been touched, it is compared against the base to see
> if there was an actual change. If you modify a file's property, it
> changes an internal file in the .svn directory and Subversion picks up
> that timestamp change.
>

Just a point of clarification. Subversion looks at two things to determine
if a file has changed.

1. The timestamp
2. The size

If the file size has changed, then SVN considers the file modified. If the
file timestamp has changed, then SVN does a byte for byte comparison with
the pristine version of the file to determine if it has changed.

A good way to make SVN really slow is to run touch on your entire working
copy. That forces SVN to have to do a compare on every single file to see if
it has been modifed. svn cleanup will repair the internal timestamps.

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/