Re: [RFC] Preserve per-file historical mtimes from Git history

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"Artem S. Tashkinov" <aros@gmx.com> writes:

Omitting parts and details that are not interesting (to me) from the
list.

>    3. How should rename following behave across complicated/non-linear
>       history?

You'd also want to think about what should happen when somebody
concatenates two files to create one.  No new contents are
introduced to the tree.

As to the definition of the historical times, I would find it a lot
more natural if they behaved as if you did this:

 * Prepare "git rev-list --first-parent --reverse HEAD" to prepare
   a list of commits that historically appeared at the tip of the
   trunk.

 * Make a checkout of the first commit in the list; give all the
   working tree files the committer timestamp of that commit.

 * Repeatedly run "git checkout" of the next commit, which should
   replace the paths that differ from the previous commit.  Give
   these paths the committer timestamp of the current commit.
   Repeat this process until you run out of the list.

and then looked at timestamp of each surviving paths in the working
tree.

>    5. Would it make sense for `git archive` to optionally use these
>       historical per-file timestamps for archive members?

Yes, it would be interesting to teach "git archive" to produce a
tarball with these synthesized timestamps.