How exactly does ctime work?

[Joshua Hudson]

We had a weird incident involving ctime changing unexpectedly when
mtime did not.

On a normal UNIX system, we'd immediately say somebody changed the
file and set mtime back, but on Cygwin, ctime appears to be synthetic.

How exactly does ctime work on Cygwin? I can't find any useful
documentation except for some mailing list discussions circa 2005 that
leave me with no answers.

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