|
If you're storing metadata in a version control system with multiple
branches, mtime differences are going to produce a whole bunch of
conflicts that you likely don't care about. This allows you to not
save mtime and avoid those.
Note that we use a sentinel value of -1 for the mentry `mtimensec` field
to indicate this in the data, as all values of `mtime` are theoretically
valid, but `mtimensec` must always be between 0 and 999,999,999 in the
real world.
I'm not 100% sure about the mechanism for selecting this feature. The
legacy behaviour for metastore was to save mtimes in the metadata files,
but ignore them for compare/apply by default, with a `--mtime` option to
use the mtime data.
Keeping the legacy behaviour for backwards compatibility, but adding a
`--no-mtime` option to ignore mtimes when saving felt like a reasonable
way of making this happen, but something about it doesn't feel great.
Maybe I just didn't figure out how to make the documentation clear
enough. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
|
