Linus on btime: “Let’s wait five years” (2010)

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

From:Linus Torvalds

Date:

Thu Jul 22 2010 - 11:16:18 EST

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On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Volker Lendecke

<Volker.Lendecke@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 01:14:47PM +0100, David Howells wrote:

> > Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >

> > > linux already has a creation time field, it's called otime (there is no "b"

> > > in "creation"), and you will find scattered fragments of that all over the

> > > kernel (foremost, fs/jfs/, now btrfs, and I also notice sysvipc having

> > > something with that name).

> >

> > It is? It's called crtime in Ext4. st_btime, however, would be compatible

> > with BSD's stat, and Samba would just use it by way of autoconf magic if it

> > appeared.

>

> Samba has the following check:

>

> # recent FreeBSD, NetBSD have creation timestamps called birthtime:

> AC_CHECK_MEMBERS([struct stat.st_birthtimespec.tv_nsec]) > AC_CHECK_MEMBERS([struct stat.st_birthtime], AC_CHECK_MEMBERS([struct stat.st_birthtimensec]))

>

> and the supporting code around that. "birth" might also be

> where the "b" comes from :-)

Oh wow. And all of this just convinces me that we should _not_ do any

of this, since clearly it's all totally useless and people can't even

agree on a name.

Let's wait five years and see if there is actually any consensus on it

being needed and used at all, rather than rush into something just

because "we can".

Linus

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Next message: Milton Miller: "[PATCH] setlocalversion: fix version for untaged nontip mercurial revs" Previous message: Kenji Kaneshige: "Re: [PATCH] x86: ioremap: fix wrong physical address handling inPAT code" In reply to: Jan Engelhardt: "Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extendedfile stats available [ver #6]" Next in thread: Volker Lendecke: "Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to makeextended file stats available [ver #6]" Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]