187231 - Downloaded files should use the server's date instead of the current date

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Downloading, enhancement)

Description

[Daryle Walker]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021104 Chimera/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021104 Chimera/0.6

I remember that when I downloaded stuff in Internet Explorer (5) for Mac OS 9,
the stuff had its create/modified date set to what the server had.  However,
Chimera and every other NeXT/UNIX downloading app uses the current date,  which
I don't think is very useful.  (I want to know when the document was created,
not when I downloaded it!)  I don't use IE for Mac OS X, so I don't know if it
keeps its Mac OS 9 behavior.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
The downloaded file has its creation date as when the download started and its
modified data as when the download finished.

Expected Results:  
Have both the creation and modified dates match the server's, or have the
creation date match the server's and the modified date match the current
date/time.  (That last part is a compromise for people who like the current
behavior.)

Comment 1

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Not sure if this is a good idea or not.

Comment 2

[Darin Fisher]

i don't think i like this idea either.  i see why it may be useful, but i think
it is fairly common practice to set the creation/modification dates according to
reality instead of trying to mirror some other file on some other system.

you can use about:cache if you'd like to see when the server thinks the file was
last modified, which brings up the following point:  if we tried to do what you
suggest, we'd only be able to do it for some files (those for which the server
has specified a Last-modified header).  the result would be inconsistent at
best.  wouldn't that just be more confusing??

Comment 3

[Daryle Walker]

I think that the date/time that the author created a file is a lot more
important (i.e. "real") than when you downloaded it.  For example, comparing
document chronologies need the documents' real ages, especially if you download
them out of order (and worse, don't realize it).  The author date should be
available in something a lot more persistent than the cache.

Every download I did with pre-X IE seemed to have the date set, so I guess that
the appropiate field is fairly common.  Remember that you have to do the same
treatment for FTP downloads, if possible.

Since the previous comments seemed to be against the idea, maybe we should go
with the compromise solution.

Comment 4

[Sören 'Chucker' Kuklau (gone)]

I thought it was common practice to change the creation date to the download
date, and the modified date to the date the file was modified on the server.

Comment 5

[Steve Dagley]

I've never seen this done except in the case of files in MacBinary format (if
even then).  The logic could be creation time as server time and modification
time as DL time but I don't see any pressing need for this so marking WONTFIX
(perhaps some external developer would care to implement it?).  If files need to
be distributed in a date preserving format they can be compressed in a date
preserving archive format such as sit/zip/rar.  And note that Mac OS X seems to
be very 'touch' happy in that I see a lot of app packages that are extracted
from archives ending up with mod dates == to extraction time.