Re: [gentoo-dev] mtime preservation

[David Leverton <levertond@googlemail.com>]

On Thursday 26 November 2009 13:21:43 Brian Harring wrote:
> It was always on the todo to convert portage over to preserving mtime-
> this long predates PMS and even EAPI.

Like, for example, use deps?  Yet somehow we managed to introduce those in a 
new EAPI, instead of retroactively adding them to all EAPIs.  Why should 
mtimes be different?

> Beyond that, I presume your intention is to stir things up

I suppose you have the right to presume whatever you want.

> It's a bit ironic really.  Y'all didn't want mtime in there so it was
> left unspecified.  Now you're complaining that portage changed it's
> behaviour (2+ years after the fact) as an arguement against adding
> mtime preservation into the next eapi.

I'm certainly not arguing against adding it, I just want it to be done 
properly, and I'm expressing distaste at people trying to blame Paludis for 
the fact that it's not as easy as some people want it to be.

> I mean paludis doesn't preserve mtimes.  People aren't going out of
> their way to break paludis (and claiming so is just trolling).

I don't think anyone's talking about changing packages purely for the sake of 
break Paludis and for no other reason, but people have been talking about 
making changes that they know will break Paludis.  (Whether they've actually 
done so is a different question, but the talk, and people blaming Paludis 
both when it behaves differently from Portage and when we've taken care to 
make it behave the same as Portage only for Portage to randomly change, are 
quite irritating.)

> Just because portage did something for a few years, does not make it
> right (this is something the PMS folk have been claiming since day
> one).  So... that arguement is invalidated by your own statements.

PMS tries to document Portage behaviour as long as it's not clearly 
unreasonable and unspecifiable.  Discarding mtimes is suboptimal behaviour, 
yes, but it's coherent enough that it can't be considered a blatent bug.  
Much like the lack of use deps in older EAPIs.