Spent all day on some horrible timestamp issues on legacy systems.
On FAT, timestamps have a 2s granularity, which is ok, but then Linux adds a temporary higher resolution cache, which is lost on unmount. This confused git-annex since the mtimes seemed to change and it had to re-checksum half the files to get unconfused, which was not good. I found a way to use the inode sentinal file to detect when on FAT and put in a workaround, without degrading git-annex everywhere else.
On Windows, time zones are a utter disaster; it changes the mtime it reports for files after the time zone has changed. Also there's a bug in the haskell time library which makes it return old time zone data after a time zone change. (I just finished developing a fix for that bug..)
Left with nothing but a few sticks, I rubbed them together, and actually found a way to deal with this problem too. Scary details in ?Windows file timestamp timezone madness. While I've implemented it, it's stuck on a branch until I find a way to make git-annex notice when the timezone changes while it's running.
Today's work was sponsored by Svenne Krap.