Preserve file creation date in Subversion

Question

My boss asked me to setup a Subversion server for him to use so that he can share all his documents across different machines in sync and still be able to access them when there is no Internet connection.

I have this up for him, but now he's requesting that the 'create date' file attribute be preserved. I explained that since he downloaded all the files that is their create date, but he insists I find a manner to preserve this as it is affecting the desktop search agent he uses. Is there any way to set this attribute to be preserved via Subversion, or do I have to write a script to get the date of each file and have him run 'touch' after each intial check out?

Note that the set of documents that were added to the SVN repository span back several years, and he wants these dates preserved across all checkouts. So the date of the last change that Subversion has could potentially be off by years from what he wants.

Answer 1

Using TortoiseSVN

• Right-click and select TortoiseSVN -> Settings
• Select Set file dates to the "last commit time"

I think that will work for you.