Directory ctimes

[Jeremy Allison]

Jim Hague wrote:

> 
> Concur. I also considered this, but rejected it for precisely this reason.
> It might be worth adding as an option, but to be honest I can't think
> offhand of a circumstance in which it would be useful. Though if you've
> already put it in, it rather suggests that somebody has.
> 

Well I'm trying to use it to workaround the VC++ bug
- which is *extremly* intransigent.

> 
> A co-worker (hi Luke) has suggested another approach. Have Samba create a
> file (say, .sambaDirAttributes) whenever it creates a directory or reports
> the ctime of a directory that doesn't have one. The directory ctime could
> then be reported as the ctime of this file. It does then raise the question
> of whether you should try to hide the file. Samba to date has avoided
> mucking with the file system for its own purposes, so I'm not sure about
> this, though it would be the closest we could get to a proper create time.
> 

Argggg.... I must confess both Andrew and I *hate* metafile-info
in the filesystem. That's why we've studiously avoided any patch 
in Samba that adds metafile-info into the filesystem instead of 
using the inodes & filesystem structures "as god intended" :-).

NetATalk does this and a goodly amount of traffic on their
list is 'what to do when the metafile info gets screwed up'.
They have to though, due to the Mac resource/data fork stuff.
Samba doesn't and I must admit I'd rather not put any patch
into Samba that would depend on them.

As Samba tends to do stat calls on directory entries anyway,
in order to report the file info levels, it might be possible to
look for the oldest available time seen when doing a traversal
of all the files in a directory and then stick it into the directory 
scan structure and return it when requested.

Hmmmm. It's a nasty one.

> You deny the divinity of Redmond? Yea, verily, you will be cast out into
> the slime of the unbelievers :-)
> 

Well they're not so bad (heresy I know, but they've helped us
more than a lot of the UNIX vendors have :-) - they just have
a habit of living in their own navels (topologically very
strange :-).

Jeremy.

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