[Nottingham] atime again...

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 02:31:14PM +0100, Martin wrote:
> The /only/ use case I know is where Mutt monitors atime for mbox files.

This was the only use-case I have encountered as well, on Mutt and
other MUAs, before I switched from Mbox to Maildir.

> However, that is an old obsolete way of doing things. As far as I know,
> there are *no other use cases* ...

It's only "obsolete" because more modern MUAs don't use Mbox, AFAIK.
Unless MUAs that use Mbox now use filesystem watches or something?
Otherwise I don't think there is a way to tell that an Mbox has been
updated without reading it all.

> Should we have noatime as the new default for mounting filesystems?

Personally I use noatime on all filesystems where I'm the only user,
or where I know everything that will be used on it and know they
don't care about atime.

If that's not the case then I use relatime which I understand
throttles the writes so much that it's basically not noticeable.
It's not 24 hours by the way; I believe it's a matter of 1 second or
so!

Cheers,
Andy

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