[Dovecot] Deleting messages from MailDir

[mouss]

Bill Cole wrote:
> At 12:21 AM -0500 2/13/08, Benjamin R. Haskell  imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
>   
>> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008, Rody wrote:
>>     
>>> Op woensdag 13 februari 2008 00:43, schreef Bill Cole:
>>>       
>>>> Yes, but you may also care that ctime is reset when a client has
>>>> Dovecot move a message from one subfolder to another within a
>>>> Maildir. I'm not sure why Dovecot does it, but a look at the messages
>>>> in the non-INBOX parts of my Maildir reveals that the ctime is always
>>>> later than the mtime, and the contents (Received headers) makes it
>>>> clear that Dovecot sets the mtime of messages to the original mtime
>>>> (i.e. original delivery time) when copying them.
>>>>
>>>>         
>> I think the answer to "why Dovecot does it" is actually that Dovecot doesn't do anything with ctime. Under most *nix filesystems, ctime is the last time the inode underlying the file/dir was changed ('c' for "changed", not "created" -- [usually]). The inode gets changed when the file's moved from one directory to another.
>>     
>
> Not on all filesystems. Note what HFS+ (MacOS) does:
>
> ~ $ ls -lc foo
> -rwxr-xr-x   1 wkc  wkc  332 Jan 29 03:32 foo
> ~ $ mkdir foodir
> ~ $ mv foo foodir
> ~ $ ls -lc foodir/foo
> -rwxr-xr-x   1 wkc  wkc  332 Jan 29 03:32 foodir/foo
> ~ $ date
> Wed Feb 13 08:39:24 EST 2008
>
>
>   

The question is whether this is because of an fs limitation or is it for 
compatibility with some old tools.

Posix says:

Upon successful completion, /rename/() shall mark for update the 
/st_ctime/ and /st_mtime/ fields of the parent directory of each file.


and ctime is the last status change time. AFAICT, an mv is certainly a 
status change.


but maybe I disgress:)