On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> Hello, Andrew!
> > Here is an answer : FAT does't allow wrote notodd number of seconds in
> > modification time (for example you will never be able set 17 Feb 2000 8:00:31
> > as modification time to any file on FAT volume). It's a very old story why MS
> > used 32bit timestamp but we need to change something in CVS to prevent sending
> > half of files again to CVS server during update.
>
> The solution will be to use MD5 checksums before sending files to the
> server. This idea is actively discussed, and I hope that it will be
> implemented soon, maybe as an unofficial patch.
If I have checked out a module with 1000 files in it, averaging 50K per
file, using MD5 checksums to decide that no files have changed will
require reading 50 megabytes from disk --- perhaps 10 or 20 seconds.
Statting the 1000 files is likely to take much less than one second.
This is a solution, but it is not free.
It would be very nice to have the feature suggested by Andrew instead.
