Re: [PATCH] UTC timestamp option for FAT filesystems

barry bouwsma
2008-06-25T13:37:41Z

Moin moin!

May I just add a resounding YES-YES-YES to the message which was
posted earlier today as
Message-ID: <>
oh b*gger, that doesn't help when snarfing from a web archive
(voluntary use as a non-subscirber of a webmail interface prevents
me from including a References: header without more effort than I
care to do now, not that this would help)

I was actually just about to post an almost identical message today
to clean out my repository of hacks, with almost the same justifications.

In addition, may I request that not only the option `-o utc,...' be
accepted, but also as an alternate, the string `gmt', not because it's
more accurate (it isn't) but because it seems to be tradition to use
GMT+/-xxxx in lots of places.

Another justification which wasn't mentioned, but which I would put
forth, is that last time I checked, the BSDen were using UTC as their
MSDOS timestamp base, so such an option would make it easier to
exchange data between BSD and Linux machines with a normal USB stick
or flash card. And I was doing that a year or three ago when I hacked
my hack.

I'll have to do a line-by-line comparison with my hacked code (last
applied to 2.6.24-ish) to make sure I don't have any differences, but
in order to allow users the option to specify the seeped-in-tradition-
especially-for-us-old-f*rts `gmt', here's the trivial-to-correct
section of code -- may well be different than in the patch since I
didn't save it before being kicked offline:

in fs/fat/inode.c
880 {Opt_debug, "debug"},
881 {Opt_immutable, "sys_immutable"},
882 /* XXX HACK */
883 {Opt_utc, "utc"},
884 {Opt_utc, "gmt"},
885 {Opt_obsolate, "conv=binary"},
886 {Opt_obsolate, "conv=text"},

(I use `-o utc' myself but would prefer to be flexible to alternate uses)
I notice this most when I fail to include the needed patches when
updating kernel

thanks
barry bouwsma