ctime: creation or change time?

[Eric Melski]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Mar  2 13:19, eric@melski.net wrote:
> 
>>In fact, NTFS has no notion of file change time as described in POSIX.  Is there
>>any chance of undoing this change?  An alternative solution might be to simply
>>use the NTFS file modify time for both the mtime and ctime of the file, since
>>those two are almost always updated together anyway.
> 
> 
> Well, we're trying to be POSIX like, so that's nothing we're going to
> revert.  I guess we're using ctime as change time even more in future.

I understand that you're trying to be POSIX-like, but I wonder if 
doing so at the cost of compatibility with the host OS is wise. 
To be sure, the implementation you have chosen will break some 
Windows applications.

It seems to me that ultimately you are emulating POSIX-like 
behavior on top of what is fundamentally NOT a POSIX-like system. 
  If that is so, then why not use a different implementation that 
is sure not to break existing non-Cygwin Windows applications? 
The proposal I made previously (report Windows modify time as 
both Cygwin mtime and ctime) would give Cygwin applications a 
reasonable approximation of ctime in the POSIX sense, while 
retaining a correct value of creation time for Windows applications.

Thanks,

Eric Melski


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