[Xapian-tickets] [Xapian] #333: Keep track of last modification time of database

[Xapian]

#333: Keep track of last modification time of database
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 Reporter:  richard        |       Owner:  olly     
     Type:  enhancement    |      Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal         |   Milestone:           
Component:  Backend-Chert  |     Version:  SVN trunk
 Severity:  normal         |    Keywords:           
Blockedby:                 |    Platform:  All      
 Blocking:                 |  
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Comment(by olly):

 I think we want to avoid putting timestamp information into the database
 itself.

 For the actual case here (checking manually which database was created
 when) ```ls -lt /PATH/TO/DB|head``` works well.

 For HTTP "If-Modified-Since" and similar cases, I think the best option is
 a method which (in a backend-specific way) gets a suitable timestamp from
 the database files, or else returns {{{(time_t)-1}}}.  Copying or
 replication may touch that timestamp, but I don't think that's much of an
 issue for the uses we're anticipating (and replication could easily
 replicate the file timestamps too).

 The big plus of this approach is it works for all existing disk-based
 databases, and could be implemented if someone wrote a backend for a
 "foreign" format (say, a Lucene backend).

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/333#comment:3>
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