Re: Git should preserve modification times at least on request

[Peter Backes <rtc@helen.PLASMA.Xg8.DE>]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 11:32:23PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2018, Peter Backes wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 11:46:38AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > 
> > > I would probably invent a file format (`<mtime><TAB><path><LF>`)
> > 
> > I'm stuck there because of <path> being munged.
> 
> From which command do you want to get it? If you are looking at `git
> diff`, you may want to use the `-z --name-only` options to avoid munging
> the paths.

I plan to use "git diff-tree --name-only $w_tree HEAD" and subtract
all lines from "git diff-index --name-only HEAD" to get the files for 
which the timestamp should be stored..

If I use "-z" I get the non-munged path, but I cannot safely store such 
paths in the proposed file format; they might contain newlines (sigh). 
So at one point I have to munge. Then the same question arises when I 
have to get the actual path from the munged path when restoring the 
timestamps.

If there's no ready-made functionality to munge and unmunge paths, I 
have to write some awk for this. At first I thought this might add one 
more dependency to git, but it seems that awk is already used in 
git-mergetool.sh, so I suppose it's okay to use in git-stash.sh etc, 
too.

Best wishes
Peter

-- 
Peter Backes, rtc@helen.PLASMA.Xg8.DE