mtime in kdesvn

[ciobi@…]

It is generally accepted in the open-source community that the time when a file was last changed (a.k.a mtime) is useless. As such, all the open-source version control systems that I know of make a point in destroying the mtime (while all the paid ones that I know of offer the option of keeping and using it.)

A few, though, including myself, really like their mtimes. There is a rather large thread detailing the attempt to get this feature into Subversion at  http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1256 . There seem to be some quite compelling use cases from web developers, but the chances of Subversion ever dealing with mtime are very slim.

There are several patches that allow mtime to be used, but I don't like CLI that much. As far as I can tell, they use "Subversion Properties" to achieve this.

So I wonder if something along these lines could be implemented in kdesvn and what's the likelyhood of this happening.

I guess it would be best if Rajko implemented this, as he knows the code. Otherwise, I'm going to try and do it myself, but I'm likely to break some things, as I don't have the time too get really familiar with the code.

The way I see this implemented in the UI is a combobox in the config dialog, where mtime usage can be "none" (default), "commit and checkout" and "commit"; and using mtime rather than "commit time" in "Change date" fields. Would be nicer to show both change time and commit time, but it's more work. More details would have to be clarified (e.g. merge's), but I'll get to those only if there's anybody else interested in this.

Ciobi

[alwin]

Inserting an extra column containing the mtime on working copies should be possible.