Date to consider when removing backup files (related to bug #593479)
Geert Janssens
janssens-geert at telenet.be
Wed Oct 13 12:49:10 EDT 2010
This question is related to bug report #539479 [1]. Replies are probably best
added as comments to the bug report instead of here on the list.
Currently, backups of data files are considered for removal based on the time
stamp string in their name. This requires some potentially risky pointer
arithmetics to convert this time stamp in a date that can be compared to the
current date.
I'm working to remove the pointer arithmetics altogether. There are several
ways to do so. But I figured the most elegant way was not to use the time
stamp extracted from the file name, but actually using the file's modification
time.
In normal circumstances these should result in the same date, but the
modification time doesn't require pointer tricks.
I know there can be cases where these two are not the same, particularly when
the user has altered the file afterwards in some way or another. I think in
that case it makes sense to keep the file a while longer and using the
modification time would do the right thing (the modification time will be more
recent than the string time stamp).
On the flip side, if the modification time is different from the string time
stamp, it could be confusing to the user as to why a file is still there if
the string time stamp is passed the expiration date while the modification
time is not.
Personally I'd prefer to ignore this little drawback though.
Ok if I go ahead and change this ?
Geert
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593479
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