Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sourceware.org/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Eric Melski <spam AT melski DOT net>
Subject: Re: ctime: creation or change time?
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:50:56 -0800
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <d087jg$t98$1@sea.gmane.org>
References: <1109798389 DOT 42262df5e7c1d AT webmail DOT namezero DOT com> <20050303113059 DOT GC2839 AT cygbert DOT vinschen DOT de>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Complaints-To: usenet AT sea DOT gmane DOT org
X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: nat.electric-cloud.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
In-Reply-To: <20050303113059.GC2839@cygbert.vinschen.de>
X-Gmane-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-Gmane-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-MailScanner-From: goc-cygwin AT m DOT gmane DOT org
X-MailScanner-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
X-IsSubscribed: yes
Note-from-DJ: This may be spam

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Mar  2 13:19, eric AT melski DOT 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.

Thanks,

Eric Melski


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/