Do not use osutil.c with python 2.4 and Windows (issue1364) Windows python 2.4 os.stat() reports times including DST offset, while osutil.c reports the correct value, which makes status() systematically compare files content. This bug is fixed in python 2.5. Using osutil.py instead of osutil.c is 4x times slower on large repositories but current code is completely unusable. Given few people are likely to use python 2.4 on Windows this solution was considered a good trade-off compared to more invasive solutions trying to address the offset issue.