[Python-Dev] Import redesign [LONG]

[Gordon McMillan]

[Gordon]
> > No success whatsoever in either direction across Samba. In fact
> > the mtime of my Linux home directory as seen from NT is Jan 1,
> > 1980.
[Guido]
> That's only the case for an NT mount point (something of the form
> \\host\name; I notice that os.stat() only believes it exists if
> you append a backslash: \\host\name\).  For interior directories,
> at least with the Samba version that I'm using, os.stat() seems
> to give correct results.

Correct (as I discovered not long after I posted). (I find that 
from NT I have to stat some file _in_ the directory to get an 
updated mtime from the stat _of_ the directory).
 
> I think that this whole issue (that doing a stat on a directory
> to find out whether files in it were modified doesn't give usable
> results) is widely blown out of proportion.

This has come up twice: re caching importers and dircache.py 
(used only by dircmp). We've arrived at the fact that it _can_ 
be made to work on Windows boxes. NFS? Andrew (anyone 
still use that)?

IOW, do we want to trust it? Do we want to document that it 
might not be trustworthy in some situations? Make it optional-
for-wizards? Kill it?
 
IOOW, what's the proper proportion ;-)?

> The only useful bit of info is that mtimes may have an up to 2
> second granularity, and that anything as recent as 2 seconds
> should be considered as newer than the cache even if the cache is
> also less than 2 seconds.

From NT, at least, stat'ing any file in the directory seems to 
remove this 2 second limitation.


- Gordon