Re: gawk, subversion, and timestamps

[Bob Proulx]

Mike Owens wrote:
> So, the question is, what can I do to make gawk build correctly given
> that subversion screwed up all the mtimes when I imported it?

There are alternative ways of dealing with this issue.  One is not to
check into version control generated files.  Generally as a developer
I prefer that rule best.  But since you are dealing with these as
upstream vendor branches I can understand your wanting to check in the
entire thing.

The best solution to this that I know of is to 'touch' the files with
the right timestamps so that make will see things ordered by time in
the same way that they would be ordered when unpacked from the tar
image.  This depends upon the package but for gawk something like
the following.  Basically unpack a tar image and sort the directory by
time and see which ones need to be in which time ordering and force
that ordering.

  touch aclocal.m4
  find . -name Makefile.in -print0 | xargs -r0 touch
  touch configure configh.in config.status config.h

Another possibly simpler way is that you can always touch all of the
files to the same timestamp.  If they have the same timestamp then
they will appear to be up to date.  Something like this:

  find . -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 touch -r configure.ac

Bob