Question

Does anyone know of any SCM(s) (e.g. svn, git, etc) that would allow me to quickly access data as it was at a given actual time without deliberately tagging it or parsing big logs to work out what version was active at the time?

i.e.
Store values for file=X of
A (at 9am),B (at 10am),C (at 11am),D (at 2pm).

I want to be able to quickly query for the value of key at 11.30 and get back the value C.

It needs to be quick as I am planning on doing this for multiple small files, and I want it to be timestamp based rather than tag based as I want to be able to do the retrieval across multiple different repos (would be tricky to enforce same tags over all the repos as all must be available at time of tag operation).

I am keen to use an SCM as another feature I want is branching and I don’t like reinventing wheels.

Does anyone know of an SCM out there that have this timestamp style of document retrieval built in?

Answer 1

svn lets you checkout and export revisions by time.

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.tour.revs.specifiers.html

I just tried using revision timestamps with svn export for individual files, and svn checkout for a whole directory, and it seems to work fine.