CVS conflict avoidance

[Ian Lance Taylor]

   Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 10:44:43 +0000 (GMT)
   From: Mark Phillips <M.S.Phillips@nortel.co.uk>

   I tend to think CVS should be preserving repositary (version) timestamp 
   on the destination file, if they are identical.

   That way parse.c would only get rebuilt if parse.y was editied in the
   repositary or locally. Of course if you hack parse.c then someone edits
   parse.y, you deserve to get bitten....

   Maybe this should be reported to the CVS maintainers as a bug?!

The repository timestamp is already preserved on the initial checkout.
However, an update should not preserve the repository timestamp.  That
would sometimes cause changed files to look old, so in some cases make
would not compute correct dependencies.

Jason Merrill once suggested that CVS arrange for an update to
preserve the same time stamp ordering that is found in the
repository.  This would also have to be done on a checkin.  I believe
this would normally fix the problem.

However, as one of the CVS maintainers, I suspect that reporting the
bug will not really accomplish anything.  Some interested person will
have to actually write the patch.

I personally find --enable-maintainer-mode quite usable in practice,
and automake is a precedent.

Ian