From: Jonathan Nieder Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:01:41 GMT Subject: Restoring timestamps (Re: Branches & directories) Message-ID: <20110822210141.GA3880@elie.gateway.2wire.net> In-Reply-To: Hilco Wijbenga wrote: > On 22 August 2011 12:31, Kyle Moffett wrote: >> (1) The GIT data-structures simply have no place for file timestamps, and >> "git stash" is simply a special way of dumping files into a temporary commit. > > That's what I thought. The "intentionally" threw me off. It's not > intentional, it's just a side effect. For what it's worth: no, it's intentional. See, for example: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/1564/focus=1680 https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitFaq#Why_isn.27t_Git_preserving_modification_time_on_files.3F That said, something being intentional does not necessarily mean it is always _right_. So, for example, patches to allow a commit to store some timestamps, with documentation explaining when this is appropriate, would probably be welcome. Maybe a good place to store such information would be a dotfile alongside the file (so old, unaware git versions could extract the same information without fuss). Even if this feature were implemented just for "git stash", personally I would turn it off so "make" could continue to behave as I expect it to. But in principle, I don't mind the idea of it existing. :) Hope that helps, Jonathan