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Re: ctime: creation or change time?


On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:50:56PM -0800, Eric Melski wrote:
>Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>On Mar  2 13:19, eric@melski.net wrote:
>>>In fact, NTFS has no notion of file change time as described in POSIX.
>>>Is there any chance of undoing this change?  An alternative solution
>>>might be to simply use the NTFS file modify time for both the mtime and
>>>ctime of the file, since those two are almost always updated together
>>>anyway.
>>
>>Well, we're trying to be POSIX like, so that's nothing we're going to
>>revert.  I guess we're using ctime as change time even more in future.
>
>I understand that you're trying to be POSIX-like, but I wonder if doing
>so at the cost of compatibility with the host OS is wise.  To be sure,
>the implementation you have chosen will break some Windows
>applications.
>
>It seems to me that ultimately you are emulating POSIX-like behavior on
>top of what is fundamentally NOT a POSIX-like system.  If that is so,
>then why not use a different implementation that is sure not to break
>existing non-Cygwin Windows applications?  The proposal I made
>previously (report Windows modify time as both Cygwin mtime and ctime)
>would give Cygwin applications a reasonable approximation of ctime in
>the POSIX sense, while retaining a correct value of creation time for
>Windows applications.

Your arguments would be a little more persuasive if you did more than
postulate the surety of breakage and actually pointed to real breakage
or, at least, demonstrated how a windows application would be harmed by
cygwin's handling of ctime.

cgf

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