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Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2010 10:08:07 +0200 (CEST)
From: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
To: utz lehmann <lkml123@s2y4n2c.de>
cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 02/18] xstat: Add a pair of system calls to make extended
  file stats available [ver #6]
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On Friday 2010-07-30 23:22, utz lehmann wrote:
>On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 09:40 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> But the fact is, th Unix ctime semantics are insane and largely
>> useless. There's a damn good reason almost nobody uses ctime under
>> unix.
>> 
>> So what I'm suggesting is that we have a flag - either per-process or
>> per-mount - that just says "use windows semantics for ctime".
>
>When abusing an existing time stamp use atime not ctime please.
>ctime has it's uses. atime was just a mistake and is nearly useless.

MUAs make use of atime.

>And with noatime we already have creation time semantics for atime.

noatime was a late afterthought, and because it can interfere with
some programs, relatime came along too.