[ale] SVN modified timestamps

[Chris Fowler]

I am primarily a user of CVS and I have decided to migrate to SVN.   So
far I've spent many hours doing the migration, but like where this is
headed.

Most of my repositories are going to be embedded type systems.  More
than just one package.  I ran into a problem with modified timestamps
that does not occur with CVS since it will store these.  I've come up
with a solution and want to vet it out for feasibility.

Since my tree includes many packages I do _NOT*_ ever want configure to
be executed in those directories.  When I did my first migration test
yesterday I noticed that configure was being executed for each package
on a fresh build.  Not what I want.  Being a noob with SVN it took me a
while to determine that SVN does not store file time attributes.  

I hacked out a solution.

I wrote a perl program to store atime and mtime of all files in the tree
before the import.  I then created some perl utilities to use this
information.  The intention is that after I execute a svn checkout I
then execute the fix_timestamps.pl utility.  It reads a file of stored
attributes and then uses utime(2) to put those attributes back.  The
only downside of this is remembering to do a diff and update on the
TIMESTAMPS file when doing a svn ci.  It would not hurt if I forgot
since I'm only storing the source and the whole tree would need to be
rebuilt anyway.

This is the first solution I've came up with.  

Chris