[ingo] Procmail vacation script -- ctime vs mtime

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Jan 24, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Jan Schneider wrote:

> Zitat von Zachary Kotlarek <zach at kotlarek.com>:
> 
>> 
>> On Jan 22, 2011, at 11:43 AM, Jan Schneider wrote:
>> 
>>> This piece of code seem to have been working fine for the last 7 years for everyone else, so I'm a but reluctant to change it, especially since I don't use procmail.
>>> 
>>> This is the patch that added it: http://git.horde.org/diff.php/ingo/lib/Script/procmail.php?rev=1.51&rt=horde&r1=1.44&r2=1.45
>> 
>> 
>> In many cases it does work; absent inode modifications ctime and mtime are always the same. But when they are different I don't know why you'd prefer the ctime.
>> 
>> I emailed the contributor noted in the original patch (or at least tried -- as you noted it's quite old). Maybe they can explain the intent.



I talked to Micha. We seem to agree on what both the ctime and mtime versions of the script would do, we just disagree on what the "right" behavior is. I guess one man's bug is another man's feature.

Here's the example Micha presented:
You create a backup that includes the vacation address cache and restore it sometime later, preserving the mtime as tar/etc. will do given sufficient permissions. With the ctime version (the one currently in ingo) procmail will ignore this restored mtime and instead use the time of the backup restoration as the "last change" to the address cache. Under the mtime version I proposed it would use the last-modified time recorded in the archive from before the backup, even if it had been weeks before the backup was restored.

I assumed no one would want the ctime behavior, but apparently that's not true; given that no one else has complained for 7 years I'm willing to accept that I'm the odd-man-out and just patch my local version. It's not like I'll have a hard time tracking that one-character change against the master repo.

	Zach

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