Git on Windows maps creation time onto changed time

[Keith Goldfarb]

Dear git,

While tracking down a problem with a filesystem shared by Windows and Ubuntu, I 
came across the following code in compat/mingw.c (ming_fstat(), also in 
do_lstat()):

        if (GetFileInformationByHandle(fh, &fdata)) {
                buf->st_ino = 0;
                buf->st_gid = 0;
                buf->st_uid = 0;
                buf->st_nlink = 1;
                buf->st_mode = file_attr_to_st_mode(fdata.dwFileAttributes);
                buf->st_size = fdata.nFileSizeLow |
                        (((off_t)fdata.nFileSizeHigh)<<32);
                buf->st_dev = buf->st_rdev = 0; /* not used by Git */
                buf->st_atime = filetime_to_time_t(&(fdata.ftLastAccessTime));
                buf->st_mtime = filetime_to_time_t(&(fdata.ftLastWriteTime));
                buf->st_ctime = filetime_to_time_t(&(fdata.ftCreationTime));
                return 0;
        }

The assignment of buf->st_ctime doesn’t seem right to me. I understand there’s 
no good choice here, but I think a better choice would be to duplicate the 
definition used for st_mtime.

Background: When I do a git status on Windows and then later on Ubuntu (or the 
other order), it is extremely slow, as the entire tree is being traversed. I 
tracked it down to this difference in definition of c_time. Yes, I know about 
the core.trustctime variable, but my problem aside this seems like an unwise 
choice.

Thanks for listening,

K.