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

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Thursday 2010-07-22 17:14, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>>
>>> 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".

There just is no way currently to store creation times. Abusing ctimes
for write-once archives also stops working once you rsync it from one
place to another. (Which brings me to the side question of why
the ctime isn't settable through futimesnat.)