Re: What happens to DEC Ada?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) wrote in message news:<b1FHvLfJLJqb@eisner.encompasserve.org>...
> > A lot of batch, or cvs import, commit or extractions, can generate > > a lot of files with same name and same timestamp.

No, this does not need to happen, and should not happen. Remember that
all large C systems are built with make, which uses time stamps in a
crucial manner, so any system like cvs of course properly supports
time stamps. You do need to make sure that you are not misusing the
system (e.g. scripts with cp rather than cp -p in them).

> But unless they are the same bits on the disk, they are a different
> file.  On VMS you would use the 6 byte file ID and the 64 byte device
> ID to determine uniqueness.  I am sure the same construct must exist
> on other operating systems.

But that would be a bad idea, because then you could not move files
around freely, which is really important.

> Granted, someone writing a tool may neglect to consider the situation
> you describe, but that is still just an implementation bug.

Well as I say, in GNAT, we can also use logical checksums on files,
but
in fact most of the C and C++ world expects to use time stamps as the
one principle method of determining what needs to be built (and of
course there is no additional consistency check, so you are *really*
depending on time stamps in a very fundamental manner). 

I do not see any bug here, only a mixture of incorrect procedures and
probably incorrect use of tools by Nicolas.