Re: Git should preserve modification times at least on request

[Derek Fawcus <dfawcus+lists-git@employees.org>]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 10:22:36PM +0100, Peter Backes wrote:
> 
> It is pretty annoying that git cannot, even if I know what I am doing, 
> and explicitly want it to, preserve the modification time.

The use case I've come across where it would be of value is for code
archeology, either importing a bunch of tar files, or importing a
repo from some other VCS.

There preserving the mod times can be useful when one is subsequently
figuring out what changed, and the scope of the 'commits' is too big
(i.e. the granularity of the tar files themselves).

e.g. initial commits are done on tar boundaries, but one may try to
figure out individual changes from a ChangeLog file.  I've done this
a couple of times, but to date it has required keeping the untarred
trees around (or a timestamp list file from each tree), in addition
to the git repro in to which one is then synthesizing smaller commits.

DF