Re: [gentoo-council] mtime preservation

[Ulrich Mueller]

Coming back again to your previous posting.

>>>>> On Mon, 9 Nov 2009, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> The problem lies in the exceptions. Either we word PMS so vaguely
> that it's legal for the package manager to clobber any mtime (thus
> defeating the point of guaranteeing preservation at all),

Agreed. This is not what is wanted.

> or we include long, convoluted wording describing exactly the files
> Portage currently alters

Hm, maybe this isn't as bad as it seems:

,----
| The package manager must preserve modification times of regular files.
| This includes files being compressed before merging. Exceptions to
| this are:
`----

Now we need to enumerate the exceptions:

,----
| * files newly created by the package manager,
`----

This will cover splitdebug, for example. (And please don't tell me
that the wording is flawed because the PM could save a file's contents
in some buffer, then delete the file and create it newly. This would
be as unreasonable as the rot-13 example.)

,----
| * binary object files being stripped of symbols.
`----

Anything else missing from above list?

> (thus preventing reasonable-looking future changes), [...]

I don't get the point here. For any future change not covered by the
list of exceptions, the PM would have to preserve mtime, in spite of
modifying the file. Why would this prevent doing the change?

Ulrich