[darcs-users] Maintaining same file times on Win98

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 09:10:08AM -0700, David Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 05:11:56AM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> 
> > It depends on the method by which files are transfered.  For a local get,
> > darcs can now preserve file modification times (I just now added that
> > feature), but when transfering via http or ssh it can't.  I'm not sure
> > though, when one would want to do with such a feature...
> 
> What most other systems do is that they set the file modification time
> to the repository time, but only when the file is first created.  Any
> time the file is updated (merging, pulling, whatever), the time is set
> to the current time.  Otherwise build tools get easily confused.
> 
> In other words, darcs get could set the modification time, but none of
> the other commands should.

Ok, that would be consistent and reasonable.  It also could still lead to
"interesting" effects if the clocks on the computers are sufficiently out
of sync...

> The only time it really matters is when someone checks in both a source
> an target (common with autoconf files).

I see, that makes sense.  However, since darcs doesn't save that
information (that is, creation time), it wouldn't be a small task to add
this feature.  And the *best* way to deal with generated files is to not
include them in the repository.  Oh the other hand, at work I include one
autogenerated file in the repo, since it is the script that is needed to
bootstrap the test suite.  I could (and perhaps *should*) use two scripts
for the job, since I've already several times run into cases where I got
the run_test_from_scratch.sh.in out of sync with the
run_test_from_scratch.sh file, which causes no end of trouble...
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org