linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended file stats available [ver #6]

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Date:	Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:45:07 -0400
From:	Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@...il.com>
To:	Benny Halevy <bhalevy@...asas.com>
Cc:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...ozas.de>,
	Jeremy Allison <jra@...ba.org>, Volker.Lendecke@...net.de,
	David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
	linux-cifs@...r.kernel.org, linux-nfs@...r.kernel.org,
	samba-technical@...ts.samba.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	viro@...iv.linux.org.uk, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended 
	file stats available [ver #6]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Benny Halevy <bhalevy@...asas.com> wrote:
> On Jul. 22, 2010, 20:24 +0300, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...ozas.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> I beg to differ. ctime is not completely useless. It reflects changes on
>>> the inode for when you don't you change the content.
>>
>> Uh. Yes. Except that why is file metadata really different from file
>> data? Most people really don't care. And a lot of people have asked
>> for creation dates - and I seriously doubt that Windows people
>> complain a lot about the fact that there you have mtime for metadata
>> changes too.
>>
>> The point being that Unix ctime semantics certainly have well-defined
>> semantics, but they are in no way "better" than having a real creation
>> time, and are often worse.
>
> Yeah, having create time would be important.
> That said, having a non user-settable modify timestamp is crucial
> for quickly determining whether a file has changed.

How would "cp --archive" and a host of backup/restore tools work
without user-settable modify timestamps?

Or are you proposing another timestamp?  I do computer forensics, I
like timestamps, but enough is enough.

Greg
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