RE: Feature Request: Allow to stash push and pop file modification times to avoid rebuilds

From: rsbecker@nexbridge.com <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>
Date: Mar 21, 2023, 20:59 UTC
Message-ID: <000a01d95c38$0acfba10$206f2e30$@nexbridge.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAEg4PiL+Y8yxCpWaQFUswTj1qegT084w9m0rc14Kf1dEWk5G-g@mail.gmail.com>

On Tuesday, March 21, 2023 4:47 PM, Ridil culous wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>"git stash push"
>later followed by
>"git stash pop"
>does restore files but doesn't restore file modification times.
>
>It would be great if there would be an option to opt in for stashing and restoring the
>file modification times because not restoring them potentially triggers rebuilds for
>many IDEs (MSVC in my case) which can be quite expensive for big projects.

IMHO, this request would break a key bit of compatibility git has with build engines that depend on timestamps. The request would cause the IDE to have false negatives during builds because the files that changed are not recognized as changing. A typical approach to do what you are requesting, where make is involved, is to use the --touch option after the stash pop to bring objects up to date - not a great plan in C++ as you can get into signature mismatches that way. Nonetheless, could you not do something like that in MSVC?

--Randall