Appeal to respect the development history and time tracking

[Adrian Klaver]

On 08/25/2015 04:40 PM, Becker, Mischa J wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mercurial On Behalf Of Adrian Klaver
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 1:22 PM
>> To: Arne Babenhauserheide; mercurial at selenic.com
>> Cc: Mosc
>> Subject: Re: Appeal to respect the development history and time tracking
>>
>> On 08/25/2015 08:18 AM, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
>>> Am Dienstag, 25. August 2015, 07:26:45 schrieb Adrian Klaver:
>>>>> At least add warning that all the date and time stamps of all files
>>>>> and all directories would be destroyed _forever_ after using
>> Mercurial SCM.
>>>>
>>>> What are you talking about?
>>>>
>>>> Or better yet, can you provide a coherent example?
>>>
>>> Even though I disagree with Mosc (especially on the apes thing), I can
>>> provide an example:
>>>
>>> I use deft-mode[1] to organize my writings. It shows and filters text
>>> files in a directory. For each file it shows the title (first line)
>>> and the data, and it sorts by date.
>>>
>>> This weekend I had partial failure of the data on my system USB stick,
>>> including that folder. Some files were lost, so I recloned the deft
>>> directory -- and all files had the same date, so the ordering was
>> wrong.
>>
>> Alright, I see. I would expect cloning to change the timestamps, it just
>> a variation of copying files, which does the same thing.
>>
>> Still not sure what the problem is?
>
> "Perfect tool must accurately save and accurately restore creation and modification date and time of the files and directories ..."
>
> I think Mosc is complaining about the fact that Mercurial, and other VCSs, only consider the file contents important and don't track file meta data like Date Created and Date Modified.  I myself was surprised to discover, the first time I updated to an older revision, that files had a modified date of right then instead of the dates they had when the revision was committed.

Alright I see. Still, that role is assumed by the commit history, so I 
am not sure what information is really lost. The ability to run annotate 
on a file is priceless.

>
> As someone who's never used make, the fact that file foo was modified a year ago at noon when committed as revision 123 is important and useful data while the fact that foo was updated to revision 123 at 10:30 this morning is unimportant and meaningless. I rarely even bother looking at file dates now-days because they rarely tell me anything I consider helpful.  (Note: I understand Matt's point and am not suggesting this should be changed.)
>
>>>>> At least add warning that all the date and time stamps of all files
>>>>> and all directories would be destroyed forever after using Mercurial
>>>>> SCM.
>
> Assuming it isn't already somewhere on the website, it might be worth clarifying that Mercurial is not a backup system and as such it doesn't restore files with their original created and modified dates like a backup system does.
>
> Mischa Becker
>
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-- 
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver at aklaver.com