Re: [RFC PATCH] checkout: Force matching mtime between files

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

"Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org> writes:

> In the thread from 6 years ago, you asked about tar's behavior for
> mtimes. 'tar xf' restores mtimes from the tar archive, so relative
> ordering after restore would be the same, and would only rebuild if the
> original source happened to be dirty.
>
> This behavior is already non-deterministic in Git, and would be improved
> by the patch.

But Git is not an archiver (tar), but is a source code control
system, so I do not think we should spend any extra cycles to
"improve" its behaviour wrt the relative ordering, at least for the
default case.  Only those who rely on having build artifact *and*
source should pay the runtime (and preferrably also the
maintainance) cost.

The best approach to do so is to have those people do the "touch"
thing in their own post-checkout hook.  People who use Git as the
source control system won't have to pay runtime cost of doing the
touch thing, and we do not have to maintain such a hook script.
Only those who use the "feature" would.