[Quilt-dev] Re: Why --no-timestamps by default?

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Wednesday 04 November 2009 03:41:40 pm Jean Delvare wrote:
> What is the rationale for having --no-timestamps in QUILT_DIFF_ARGS
> and QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS by default?

Most of the time, those timestamps are not used. See git as an example; there 
you also don't have file timestamps. Also, removing patches in quilt will 
restore the old files, but not their timestamps: instead, the timestamps will 
be set to the current time. This allows to push and pop patches in a source 
tree and build the "before" and "after" states without confusing tool like 
make.

> I understand that quilt itself will touch the timestamp of the files, but
> even then, these timestamps seem to have some value.

Not really. Quilt would have to restore timestamps when popping patches too, 
or else the resulting patches would end up with random timestamps that "patch 
--set-time" would not apply correctly anyway.

> Would there be an objection to changing the default to timestamps
> enabled?

Yes.

Thanks,
Andreas