Re: Quick question: how to generate a patch?

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
> Did you by any chance do chmod -R, chown -R or start an ntp daemon somewhere
> in between there (don't know if clock skews will be detected by git, but...)?

off on this tangent: git shouldn't care about clock skew, because git 
never cares about the current time. The only thing that matters is that 
"stat()" returns the same time when called sequentially.

Now, if you have a distributed filesystem, and the _filesystem_ has some 
strange clock-skew problem, that would definitely screw up git.

That sounds insane, but a trivial case of it might be a networked 
filesystem where the mtime/ctime for a file create is filled in by the 
client first, but then the server will do the "final version" when it 
actually writes the file.

We used to have some bugs in our NFS client that did things like that: the 
"mtime" of a file had this confusing duality between "client time" and 
"server time", and it depended on whether the client had done a "getattr" 
to the server which one you saw.

I could well imagine that we still have some bug like that (ctime in 
particular is much less used than mtime, and thus more likely to have not 
been noticed). And it could be much worse on some less-commonly-used and 
less-unixy networked filesystem like smb, which is why I was wondering 
what OS version and filesystem Aubrey might be using.

		Linus