Re: Restoring timestamps (Re: Branches & directories)

> On 22 August 2011 16:21, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hilco Wijbenga wrote:
>>
>>> You mean an extra dotfile per file in the commit?
>>
>> Let me step back a moment.
>>
>> When you mentioned mtime, a switch went off and reminded me of the
>> problem of metadata in general, especially owner and permissions. That
>> problem is important for people keeping track of /etc or $HOME in
>> version control (always a little dangerous because of the effect of a
>> stray "git reset --hard", but never mind). And the last time it came
>> up, I convinced myself that a hook script setting up entries in
>> .gitattributes, .gitmetadata, or .etckeepr with information like "all
>> files are owned by root:root unless otherwise specified" could be a
>> good and not too invasive way to deal with that.
>>
>> Now that you remind me that the mtime of every file is likely to
>> differ from every other file, it is harder to imagine what situation
>> would make this meaningful information that should be stored in the
>> repository and shared with other people. It seems more like something
>> associated to the worktree, which fits more closely with what you are
>> trying to do, anyway.
>
> Yes, indeed.
>
>> Regarding the problem "eclipse metadata is not carried over from one
>> worktree to another", isn't that going to be a problem regardless? In
>> your proposed setup, each time you stash everything and start work on
>> a different branch, the eclipse metadata before would be stashed along
>> with everything else, which doesn't make anything any easier (unless
>> disk space is very scarce or metadata stores the absolute path to the
>> cwd).
>
> Eclipse is a wonderful IDE except for how it makes sharing workspaces
> practically impossible (where "share" means "put in SCM", not "used my
> several developers at the same time"). It's mostly (AFAICT) binary
> data with lots of absolute paths. So it's a pain but it doesn't make
> my scenario all that much more complicated.
>
> The hard part is creating a new branch. Somehow I would need to
> duplicate the state in the parent branch in the child branch. It needs
> to be duplicated because I need to be able to do git stash in the
> child branch *and* the parent branch. Is it possible to do git stash
> pop without losing the stash? Or to "copy" a stash? Otherwise, it's
> probably easier to simply write a separate script to do it. That
> should not be very hard. I would not use git stash at all.
>
> For a new branch, the script would
> 1. in "parent", move workspace (i.e. the root working dir, where .git
> is)  into .git/branches/parent/
> 2. create and jump to "child"
> 3. in "child", copy .git/branches/parent into workspace (so creating a
> new branch is no longer a cheap operation)
>
> For an existing branch, the script would
> 1. in "current-branch", move workspace into .git/branches/current-branch
> 2. jump to "other-branch"
> 3. in "other-branch", move .git/branches/other-branch into workspace
>
> The moves (assuming everything is on the same partition) should make
> switching branches relatively cheap. Not very elegant (quite brute
> force in fact) but it's simple and I think it would work. Or did I
> overlook something? Better/other ideas are certainly welcome. :-)