Re: Nanosecond fs timestamp support: sad

J. Bruce Fields
2011-07-22T23:49:26Z

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 07:06:12PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 08:59:15AM +1000, NeilBrown wrote:
> > But does anyone apart from NFSv4 actually *want* i_version as opposed to the
> > more-generally-useful precise timestamps?
>
> It *seems* like a generally useful idea, but I don't know of any other
> users.

(Out of curiosity: what actually *needs* real timestamps?:
- They're generally useful to people, of course; ("what did I
change last tuesday?")
- Make uses them, though in theory perhaps it could do the same
job by caching records like "object X was built from
versions a, b, and c of objects A, B, and C respectively".

But a lot of uses are probably just to answer the question "did this
file change since the last time I looked at it"?

Of course, however theoretically useful, there's always the argument
that linux-specific interfaces are unlikely to be used by anyone except
Lennart Poettering.)

--b.