Re: Automatically keeping "last modified" up to date

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 08/06/2013 04:11 PM, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> FWIW, my work flow is such that I never build on top of the directory
> that CVS downloads into.   I have a script that builds via the sequence
> 1) create a new working directory
> 2) copy the CVS download into this new directory
> 3) cd to that directory
> 4) ./prepare
> 5) ./configure
> 6) make
>
> When doing development I only modify and rebuild from files in this
> working directory, so the issue of divergence from the pure CVS copy
> does not arise.  To prepare a patch corresponding to the work I have
> just done, I can do a "diff -urp" between the pristine CVS directory
> and the working directory.  I realize that other people have other
> work flows.

This approach is fine with CVS, but with something like mercurial/git 
probably wouldn't work.  The clone is tied to a certain directory and 
deviating from that would cause problems.  With mercurial, the diff 
facility is incorporated into the software, i.e., "hg diff".  To 
transfer modifications, one would actually create a changeset first, 
i.e., "hg commit", and then either push that to the canonical repository 
or create a patch file with "hg export" that someone else could import 
to test.

Dan