> if we're interested in coming to consensus, i'll pipe up and say i > really like the idea of mtime being proc start time. i've wanted this > many times and only didn't add it because i (foolishly) assumed it'd > be more involved than the apparently-trivial diff. being able to 'ls > -lt /proc' is genuinely useful, and i'm curious why you'd dismiss it. > as you say, the compile time of the kernel is useful (and not really > confusing) as well, but is preserved in nearly every other device on > the system.
it duplicates information already in the status file, and it would be the *only* kernel device file in the system that didn't use kerndate as the mtime. when did the plan 9 approach become "there's more than one way to do it"? ls -t /proc is of course indistinguishable from ls | sort -n. ls -lt /proc just gives you some dates in sorted order. it's useless unless you somehow have the pid->process info mapping stored in your head. if you want to change ps(1) to *display* the start time of a process, i think that could be genuinely useful. putting an extra copy on the directory mtime is not. russ
