Subject: Re: Millisecond precision in timestamps?

From: "Eric S. Raymond" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:47:00 -0500

Jeff King <[email-masked]>:
> A much more compelling argument to me would be that you are doing some
> bidirectional magic between git and svn, and you want to make make sure
> that an svn->git->svn translation will result in the exact same bytes.
> Then the argument is still "because SVN has it", but at least it is "and
> we interoperate with it" and not simply chasing a cool but useless
> feature.

Er, well, that *is* in fact the exact reason I want it.

I didn't put it exactly that way because I didn't expect anyone here
to particularly care about round-tripping like that.  But remember 
that I do a lot of stuff with repo surgery and conversion tools.

As a matter of fact (and this list is the first to hear about it) 
I'm working on code right now that massages a git import stream
into a Subversion dumpfile.  Soon, unless I hit a blocker I'm
not expecting, I'll ship it.

Yes, there will be serious limitations and unavoidable metadata loss.
But in every case *except timestamps* that loss is Subversion's fault
for having a weak ontology.  Timestamps are the one place git doesn't 
hold up its end.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>