Preserving timestamps with git

[Jakob Voss]

Olaf TNSB wrote:

> Can you explain (or give a simple example) why you need the timestamps
> to be "correct".
 >
 > After moving to a versioned homedir (and getting my mind around what
 > that means) I've never worried about the revision time of my files. I
 > just knew they were either the most recent version or a particular
 > version for a particular reason.

In my homedir I have a "mypub" directory/repository with lots of 
publications (presentations, articles, drafts etc.) that I created and 
partly published over the years[*]. I frequently look up old drafts and 
publications and sometimes I continue working on a text after month or 
years. Therefore I'd like to track when I created and modified which 
document.

 > I can understand the need for other metadata (file perms for .ssh for
 > example) but not file date. Perhaps I'm missing something huge that
 > will make my life easier...

As I only track my own files I do not need to preserve ownership and the 
default permission should be 027 (u=rwx,g=rx,o=) for all my files. There 
is only a problem with files that should be readable by anyone (or the 
other way you make all files publicly readable and must treat the 
private files in a special way). Versioning public_html is also a 
problem because files must be readable by www-data (and some also 
writable) - is this where you use metastore for?

Cheers,
Jakob

[*] Maybe I will later create a branch with the public subset of this 
files. At this place file permissions would also help: a cronjob could 
look for files with permission "o+r" and push these into a public 
repository. And the other way: a cronjob checks for files which are both 
in a private repository and its public branch and sets permission "o+r" 
on those.