1156060 - No macBirthDate or nixBirthDate for OS.File.DirectoryIterator entries nor for OS.File.stat

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit Graveyard :: OS.File, defect)

Description

[noitidart]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150416143048

Steps to reproduce:

Open browser console

Enter this code: let iterator = new OS.File.DirectoryIterator(OS.Constants.Path.desktopDir); let prom = iterator.nextBatch().then(x=>console.log('x:',x))


Actual results:

http://i.imgur.com/eMJmnir.png

On left is mac, middle is windows, right is ubuntu. We see mac and ubuntu have no birthdate. Docs say there should be a macBirthDate but I can't find it.


Expected results:

birthDate's should be given by iterator entry and also by stat

Comment 1

[noitidart]

here is stat on mac: http://i.imgur.com/JjFrICV.png
stat on ubuntu: http://i.imgur.com/B6d8UHW.png

we see no birthDate

Comment 2

[noitidart]

maybe we can also make these functions return an inode for os'es that support it (unix)

Comment 3

[Vladan Djeric (:vladan)]

Yoric: Is this a known limitation?

Comment 4

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

No unixBirthDate is normal, as the information is not available under Linux, even at low-level.
No macBirthDate, however, is a bug. The worker API has it (https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/osfile/modules/osfile_unix_front.jsm#887) but we do not have any test for the main thread API.

Comment 5

[noitidart]

Thanks guys, what is an alternative for unixBirthDate for unix devs? Ill note this on the docs. As when i needed it, i couldnt out what was the next best alt.

Comment 6

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

I don't know of any alternative, even at low-level. I don't think that the file system actually holds the information.

Comment 7

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Noida, if you're interested, I can mentor you in fixing the absence of `macBirthDate`.

Comment 8

[noitidart]

(In reply to David Rajchenbach-Teller [:Yoric] (use "needinfo") from comment #7)
> Noida, if you're interested, I can mentor you in fixing the absence of
> `macBirthDate`.

Thanks Yoric I would really love to because I want to fix the isSymlink bug as thats not working either. And then i want to implement shortcut for windows and possibly hardlink instead of unixSymlink. And maybe add something in for unix users to use. And maybe possibly (if you guys agree) merge the js-ctypes version of the file watching, I don't know if you guys want it to jsctypes though.

What's the first step to take to fix this macBirthDate? Thanks!

Comment 9

[noitidart]

(In reply to David Rajchenbach-Teller [:Yoric] (use "needinfo") from comment #7)
> Noida, if you're interested, I can mentor you in fixing the absence of
> `macBirthDate`.

Hey yoric i built firefox, i think im ready now :)

Comment 10

[noitidart]

Also it looks like we can get the creation time on unix, we just have to detect the file system and use the per-filesystem method:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/10172234/1828637

``````
    UFS2 / st_birthtime
    ZFS / crtime
    Ext4 / crtime
    btrfs / otime
    HFS+ / ?
``````

Comment 11

[noitidart]

Ooops forgot to need info you :) Im ready to go got Firefox built and even set up visual studio (and practiced my first C++) today in case i need to do C++ or C stuff.

Comment 12

[noitidart]

Ooops forgot to need info you :) Im ready to go got Firefox built and even set up visual studio (and practiced my first C++) today in case i need to do C++ or C stuff.

Comment 13

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Filed the MacOS X version as bug 1168355 and comment 10 as bug 1156060.

Comment 14

[Beth Rennie [:beth] (she/her)]

OSFIle is being replaced with IOUtils and PathUtils.