[Unison-hackers] On making times=true the default

[Benjamin Pierce]

I may be being overly cautious here. I certainly use -times=true myself.

As for history, I'm not sure there was a very strongly reasoned reason for
the default setting being false.  It's possible that flag was added
sometime after the initial system was deployed and we were already feeling
cautious about not disrupting people's expectations.



On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 3:28 PM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

> Benjamin Pierce <bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu> writes:
>
> > FWIW, I'm a little nervous about changing defaults on something so
> > fundamental.
> >
> > E.g., we can be careful not to do it when using old archives where times
> > have not been synced, but what if those archives get blown away and the
> > user expects to be able to just run unison again to recreate them from
> > scratch?  This is something some people might be quite surprised by.
>
> Assuming we can implement automatic merge to older mtime, what are you
> concerned about in terms of semantics and user expectations?
>
> Do you think someone is relying on the mtimes of a replica where unison
> rwote the file (as opposed to the user) being the time that it was
> synced, instead of the most recent non-sync change?
>
> If you do believe that people that want this exist, do you think they
> are more than a tiny minority?   Would they be adequately served by a
> caution in NEWS to set --times=false, to get this old semantics?
>
> (I view lack of syncing mtimes as a bug, and I am guessing it was
> inspired by Windows trouble.  But a historical perspective might be
> helpful.)
>
>
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