Re: Restoring timestamps (Re: Branches & directories)

Hilco Wijbenga wrote:

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.

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).

Sorry for the lack of clarity. Jonathan