Re: [PATCH] ext4: explain encoding of 34-bit a,c,mtime values

From: David Turner <novalis@novalis.org>
To: "Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>
Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>, Mark Harris <mhlk@osj.us>,
	Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>, Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>,
	Ext4 Developers List <linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] ext4: explain encoding of 34-bit a,c,mtime values
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 00:12:26 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1392095546.10065.56.camel@chiang> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140122062255.GA8973@birch.djwong.org>

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 22:22 -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 07:30:18PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 02:56:54AM -0500, David Turner wrote:
> > > b. Use Andreas's encoding, which is incompatible with pre-1970 files
> > > written on 64-bit systems.
> > >
> > > I don't care about currently-existing post-2038 files, because I believe
> > > that nobody has a valid reason to have such files.  However, I do
> > > believe that pre-1970 files are probably important to someone.
> > > 
> > > Despite this, I prefer option (b), because I think the simplicity is
> > > valuable, and because I hate to give up date ranges (even ones that I
> > > think we'll "never" need). Option (b) is not actually lossy, because we
> > > could correct pre-1970 files with e2fsck; under Andreas's encoding,
> > > their dates would be in the far future (and thus cannot be legitimate).
> > > 
> > > Would a patch that does (b) be accepted?  I would accompany it with a
> > > patch to e2fsck (which I assume would also go to the ext4 developers
> > > mailing list?).
> > 
> > I agree, I think this is the best way to go.  I'm going to drop your
> > earlier patch, and wait for an updated patch from you.  It may miss
> > this merge window, but as Andreas has pointed out, we still have a few
> > years to get this right.  :-)
> 
> Just out of curiosity, did this (updated patch) ever happen?

I think I sent a usable patch that Ted merged part of into e2fscktools;
the kernel portion was dropped for some reason.

While I was waiting to hear back on the kernel portion, I started
looking into the dtime stuff, but then I got distracted by a new job.

Assuming that I won't have time to deal with dtime (since it seems to be
much more complicated), is the right way forward for me to rebase the
non-dtime portion of my patch against the latest kernel, and resend it?
If so, will it get merged?  (Assume here that I do the same with the
e2fsck stuff)