Re: [PATCH] Make use of stat.ctime configurable

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Hmm. I think that's just a plain POSIX oddity. There's no real "reason" 
for it, except the historical one: in really old UNIX terms, rename used 
to be a "link+unlink".

Side note: a lot of the mtime/ctime/atime rules are really pretty 
arbitrary. They've grown over time, and have various historic reasons.
'ctime' in particular is more arbitrary than most, and I don't at all 
guarantee that all Unixes will work exactly the same wrt ctime and rename. 

In fact, I -can- guarantee that some older versions of Linux haven't 
always updated ctime on renames, for example, and it's probably still 
per-filesystem.

			Linus