On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, Bill Lear wrote: > > I often find myself in branch A, with everything checked in and > compiled, wanting to look at something on branch B. I hop to branch > B, look, and come back to branch A. Unfortunately, when I then do a > make, files that differed between A and B will be recompiled, as well as > any further dependencies. > > I wonder if it would be possible or desirable to have a config flag > that told git to restore the timestamps across branch checkouts in > order to prevent this perturbation. I think you're much better off just using multiple repositories instead, if this is something common. Messing with timestamps is not going to work in general. It's just going to guarantee you that "make" gets confused in a really bad way, and does not recompile *enough* instead of recompiling *too much*. Git does make it possible to do your "check the other branch out" thing very easily, in many different ways. You could create some trivial script that does any of the following (ranging from the trivial to the more exotic): - just create a new repo: git clone old new cd new git checkout origin/<branch> and there you are. The old timestamps are fine in your old repo, and you can work (and compile) in the new one, without affectign the old one at all. Use the flags "-n -l -s" to "git clone" to basically make this instantaneous. For lots of files (eg big repos like the kernel), it's not going to be as fast as just switching branches, but havign a second copy of the working tree can be quite powerful. - do the same thing with just a tar-ball instead, if you want to git archive --format=tar --prefix=new-tree/ <branchname> | (cd .. ; tar xvf -) which is really quite fast, if you just want a snapshot. - get used to "git show", and just look at individual files. This is actually *really* useful at times. You just do git show otherbranch:filename in one xterm window, and look at the same file in your current branch in another window. In particular, this should be trivial to do with scriptable editors (ie GNU emacs), where it should be possible to basically have a whole "dired mode" for other branches within the editor, using this. For all I know, the emacs git mode already offers something like this (I'm not an emacs user) - and in the extreme example of that "virtual directory" thing, there was at least somebody working on a git plugin for FUSE, ie you could literally just have virtual directories showing *all* your branches. and I'm sure any of the above are better alternatives than playing games with file timestamps. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html