create time format in EAs

[Björn JACKE]

On 2010-01-06 at 17:20 -0800 Jeremy Allison sent off:
> The current "create time" semantics Samba provides are Windows
> (ie. clients can change it). What should a POSIX "create time"
> semantic be ? Currently there is no agreement on this (should
> it be immutable after the file is created - this seems to be
> the current idea). We need to define what sematics create time
> means in POSIX before we think about storing non-Windows create
> time.

there are already Unix systems supporting creation timestamps. No matter what
the semantics are and whether they are immutable or not - they will probably
all have ns resolution.

> Right now the only way to get at the create time via UNIX extensions
> returns NTTIME semantics, so even though the underlying birth
> time stored on a filesystem might be in ns, there's no way to
> return that.

that's how it is today. Tomorrow we might see cifs unix extensions to support
full ns resolution timestamps, something like that was already proposed on the
lists I think. That's what I have in mind when I suggest to use the highest
time resolution we might want to support in the future.

Björn