support for creation date – st_birthtime – in Dolphin, GNOME Files and other applications

[Cath O'Deray]

st_birthtime as shown in the FreeBSD manual page for stat(1)

I see:

• Bug #1484831 “ File details/properties missing in KDE overwrite dialog box” : Bugs : Linux Mint (2015-08-14) with reference to KDE bug 356278 - dolphin does not show any file information in copy dialog, which is RESOLVED FIXED (commit 83578134b3ddb090248e6db1a699d9bdf7428fe0 on 2016-02-13) but I have not yet tested to tell whether that fix allows the dialogue to show the date of creation
  
• KDE bug 374063 – file creation date (2016-12-23) for Dolphin.

For cohesive behaviour of the desktop environment with a diversity of applications, what other areas will require attention?

I think of Open … and Save … dialogues, and of GNOME Files x11-fm/nautilus, which I often use when working around issues with Dolphin. What else?

Related

In The FreeBSD Forums, post 12 under finding the creation date

In Ubuntu areas, various discussions were closed, some without a satisfactory conclusion. A handful from 2008 onwards:

• Dolphin Columns
• KDE4 - No file Meta Info?
• Why up until now Lucid Lynx still doesn't support metadata "date created"
• merge files via date created
• Nautilus 2.30.1 (file Browser) lacks columns /duration/date created/bitrate/dimension
• files/folders don't show 'date created', just 'date modified'
• Nautilus: sort files by date created?
• Retaining "Date Created" information...

– and captured in the Wayback Machine, two of the brainstorms that were mentioned in an early discussion:

• Idea #5211: "More details about files in nautilus list view" - Ubuntu brainstorm (2008-03-20)
• Idea #8763: "Add "Sort by Date Created" option in Nautilus" - Ubuntu brainstorm (2008-05-18)

Last but not least, from statx() v3 [LWN.net] (2016-11-30):

Some developments just take a long time to truly come to fruition. That has proved to be the case for the proposed statx() system call …

… information relevant to files now, including generation and version numbers, file creation time, encryption status, whether they are stored on a remote server, and so on. …

– that might help to explain the dissatisfaction

 

[Cath O'Deray]

⚙ D5138 Fill UDS_CREATION_TIME with the value of st_birthtime on FreeBSD led to commit R241:16f69a5d0d55 on 2017-04-17.

For Linux, the following KDE bugs remain open:

• 286689 – Dolphin should be able to show a column for file creation date, when available
• 381367 – Populate UDS_CREATION_TIME on Linux when the statx() system call is available.

Dolphin 17.07.90 on FreeBSD-CURRENT

FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #0 r320869: Mon Jul 10 13:57:55 UTC 2017 root@releng3.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC

Minor issues:

• there sometimes appear gaps in the Created column, sometimes not filled by a refresh
• it'll be nice to gain a way of formatting the Accessed, Created and Modified columns (in the meantime, I like the 2017-07-18T06:37:00 style).

The Properties dialogue already uses consistent formatting for all three timestamps:

Not recently, but occasionally I saw metadata suggesting that a file was modified before it was created (logically impossible) but I'm almost certain that was not an issue with Dolphin or KDE; the same weirdness was observed with Lumina, last year, in the first screenshot under Insight shows the wrong date of creation · Issue #336 · trueos/lumina.