libsvn_client currently sleeps at the end of any operation that relies on WC
timestamps in order for the WC to detect subsequent modifications to files. But
sometimes it sleeps when it doesn't need to.
It seems to me that the tracking of whether we need to sleep should be done
inside libsvn_wc, as only there do we really know whether we have made a change
that relies on the timestamp.
The current code is all in libsvn_client and can only assume that if it called
something like svn_wc_revert or svn_wc_do_update then it will need to sleep,
which is a crude assumption (not always true). Within libsvn_wc we would also
have the ability to store more detailed information. For example, we could
store the latest timestamp that we are relying on, so that at the end of the
operation we wouldn't have to sleep for a further one second (or whatever period
is required) but only wait until at least one second starting from when the last
WC update was, a period which might have already elapsed or partly elapsed in
some cases. Another example is we could store more precise information about
which paths (and therefore which filesystems) are affected, and thus determine
exactly how long we need to sleep.
I mentioned this in an email to dev@, subject "[PATCH] Sleep for timestamps in
the right places", 2013-04-02, archived at e.g.
<http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2013-04/0036.shtml>.
Improvement
Major