Subversion - Timestamp changes, but content does not

Question

Hello there,

I think this is hard to describe, but I will try:

We're using Subversion an Buildtools. When we make a Build from our Project, several files will be overwritten, of course. So the timestamp of these files changes, but the content might be the same as before.

An svn diff will display the following for exanple: - test.txt changed - 100 lines removed - 100 lines added

Is there a possability to make subversion only look at the content of files and ignore the timestamp of files?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This doesn't exactly answer you question, but...

Traditionally, you would avoid adding generated files to version control.

Instead, only the source files are added, and the files are then generated on the destination.

There are some situations where that rule would be broken, but my first question would be to ask what would happen to your build process (especially on a clean machine) if you simply removed the files in question from Subversion.

Answer 2

If an svn diff reports changes, then the file content has changed, not just the timestamp. It may only be whitespace changes or more likely EOL changes. But they're still changes and Subversion correctly reports them.

Here's a detailed description on how Subversion determines whether a file has changed or not.