Re: [gentoo-dev] mtime preservation

[Brian Harring]

Potentially just being a tool and taking the bait..

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 12:41:55PM +0000, David Leverton wrote:
> 2009/11/26 Brian Harring <ferringb@×××××.com>:
> > Why is this one special?  Two out of three do this already, and it
> > works.
>
> You mean "two out of three blatently ignored long-standing behaviour
> and added a new feature without discussion or an EAPI bump".

It was always on the todo to convert portage over to preserving mtime- 
this long predates PMS and even EAPI.

This stretches all the way back to '03/'04.  I'll also note that 
pkgcore from the getgo preserved mtime, back when it was called 
'portage'.  Ahh, the good old days before svn pissed me off enough to 
move it outside of gentoo.

Beyond that, I presume your intention is to stir things up- PMS went 
out of it's way to explicitly leave it up to the manager if they 
preserve mtimes.  Meaning portage hasn't done anything wrong in 
changing it's behaviour.

It's a bit ironic really.  Y'all didn't want mtime in there so it was 
left unspecified.  Now you're complaining that portage changed it's 
behaviour (2+ years after the fact) as an arguement against adding 
mtime preservation into the next eapi.


> > Paludis doesn't preserve mtime
>
> You mean "Paludis carefully emulated Portage behaviour, and is now
> somehow being blamed for the whole matter, to the extent that people
> are trying to use threats (to the effect of 'I'm going to deliberately
> break packages for Paludis users") to try to get their way in the
> discussion".

I mean paludis doesn't preserve mtimes.  People aren't going out of 
their way to break paludis (and claiming so is just trolling).

Breakages happen because the common sense assumption devs have 
(preservation of mtime) aren't actually encoded as a format standard.  
Further, there are quite a few postinst hacks (and quite a few that 
don't work all that well) working around the lack of mtime 
preservation.


> > and it's approach to randomly resetting mtimes
>
> There's nothing random about it.  Files' mtimes are reset to the
> current time while being merged, just as Portage did for years.

Just because portage did something for a few years, does not make it 
right (this is something the PMS folk have been claiming since day 
one).  So... that arguement is invalidated by your own statements.

I label it as 'randomly' due to the fact it's contrary to what ebuild 
developers expect- it was a flaw when portage was doing it, it's a 
flaw that paludis does it due to it unnecessarily creating a gotcha 
for ebuild developers.  Most importantly, no one has brought up a 
single instance of mtime preservation *breaking* things- the only 
criticism leveled has been ciaranms aesthetic complaints about 
ca-certificates and older timestamps making their way to the FS.
Hence labeling it unnecessarily.


Basically, y'all need to provide actual examples of this causing 
issues- right now the responses are either quite flammable, or lacking 
in technical arguements.  More obstructionist then useful for a 
technical discourse.

~harring