Appeal to respect the development history and time tracking

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Tue Aug 25 15:04:07 UTC 2015


On Tue, 2015-08-25 at 13:40 +0300, Mosc via Mercurial wrote:
> Hi there.
> 
>  
> 
> Don’t touch date and time stamps of the files and directories, never, even
> after formatting (because it is just formatting).

Sorry, no.

If we changed this, I would expect the vast majority of users to
immediately and angrily switch to another tool that didn't horribly
break their software development process.

Mercurial is a version control systems that is designed to work in an
ecosystem of other widely-used development tools like make(1) that
expect and require the timestamps on changed files to be current to do
their job correctly.

It's no coincidence that basically all version control systems ever work
this way: make(1) came first.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.




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