RE: git svn and SVN property svn:original-date

Eric Wong wrote:

Craig McQueen [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

When doing "git svn dcommit", the SVN revision just has the date/time

stamp of the time of the dcommit.

Yeah, that's sometimes annoying to me, too.

quoted

Apparently SVN revisions can have an "svn:original-date" property, which

would be good to set on dcommit, to preserve the timestamp from the git
repository.

quoted

https://subversion.apache.org/docs/api/1.7/group__svn__props__revision

quoted

__props.html#ga8f17351dd056149da9cb490f1daf4018

Any idea if which versions of SVN it's supported in and how recent the
feature is?

I see discussion about it in 2003, so I guess it's been there right from 1.0.0.

Perhaps we can enable it everywhere, and maybe only old clients won't
understand it, but won't fail; and we could start using it as the author date
with "git svn fetch".

Using it for author date sounds sensible.

OTOH, that would break the (perhaps unofficial) independently-created-git-
svn-mirrors-should-have-same-oids-by-default
rule when people run different versions of git, so maybe it could be an
option...

Hmm, good question. Maybe it should be an option, though I hope it would be enabled by default (since the feature would be more metadata-preserving, which is a good thing), with an option to disable it to allow backwards compatibility with people running an older version of git. That's my opinion anyway, and I realise my opinion is not necessarily well-informed regarding all considerations.

Note, I'm unclear as to whether Subversion is willing to store timezone information in svn:original-date. But I guess having git author date correspond to svn:original-date is an improvement for preserving more metadata, even if the timezone is lost in the process.

-- 
Craig McQueen