Messages in this thread | | | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Date | Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:47:46 -0700 | Subject | Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6] |
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On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Volker Lendecke <Volker.Lendecke@sernet.de> wrote: > > The nice thing about this is also that if this is supposed > to be fully usable for Windows clients, the birthtime needs > to be changeable. That's what NTFS semantics gives you, thus > Windows clients tend to require it.
Ok. So it's not really a creation date, exactly the same way ctime isn't at all a creation date.
And maybe that actually hints at a better solution: maybe a better model is to create a new per-thread flag that says "do ctime updates the way windows does them".
So instead of adding another "btime" - which isn't actually what even windows does - just admit that the _real_ issue is that Unix and Windows semantics are different for the pre-existing "ctime".
The fact is, windows has "access time", "modification time" and "creation time" _exactly_ like UNIX. It's just that the ctime has slightly different semantics in windows vs unix. So quite frankly, it's totally insane to introduce a "birthtime", when that isn't even what windows wants, just because people cannot face the actual real difference.
Tell me why we shouldn't just do this right?
Linus
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