Re: RFC: checkout/temporary branch switch restoring modification times

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2010, 05:00 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinXbwtv=6TMeu0nA=jV4u7zGXE_56791ky_=93b@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4CA95B18.5090008@cockos.com>

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 04:42, Justin Frankel <justin@cockos.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I often find myself wanting to switch temporarily to another branch, and
> then back to my original branch, but what I find is that my build tools
> such as MSVC or Xcode) notice the file modification times changed on
> the changed files, and then want to rebuild, even though the contents of
> the files are the same.
>
> I've implemented a perl script (tested on OSX and msysGit), which I've
> named "git-cop" (so I can use via "git cop") to checkout,
> preserving file modification times.

Maybe something like this is a worthwhile feature, although perhaps it would be better to give each file a timestamp corresponding to when it was last modified in Git? That would break in many cases, but a scheme like this inherently does.

Have you tried to use ccache? It should reduce your build times by a lot, so perhaps if you use it you won't need this anymore.