On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Steve French [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Friday 29 April 2016 13:57:36 David Howells wrote:

quoted

struct statx *buffer);

This is an enhanced file stat function that provides a number of useful
features, in summary:

(1) More information: creation time, data version number, inode
generation
number and flags. A subset of these is available through a number of
filesystems (such as CIFS, NFS, AFS, Ext4 and BTRFS).

I have a question about birthtime/creationtime: As we are gaining a way
to read this, should we also provide a way to update it using a new
variant
of the utimensat syscall in order to have 'cp -a' create an identical
copy,
or is the idea that this is defined as the time that is particular copy
of the inode was created?

I've discussed this with Deepa in the past, as she is driving the
convertion of the inode timestamps to timespec64 now, and we will
need a new version of utimensat for her work as well. I can see good
reasons either way (allowing updates of btime or disallowing them).

It would help interop with Windows (and presumably Mac) if birth time can be
updated



-- 
Thanks,

Steve