[Python-Dev] Import redesign [LONG]

[Guido van Rossum]

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)