Re: reserved fields in stat structure

[ersmith@netcom.com (Eric R. Smith)]

>The stat structure in the stat.h include files has some "reserved fields" i.e.
>
>...
>        time_t  st_ctime;
>        short   st_attr;
>#ifdef __MINT__
>        short   res1;           /* reserved for future kernel use */
>        long    res2[2];
>#endif
>...

>Are these reserved for a known purpose at this time?  I'm interested in
>using one of the long words to return data for the size of resource forks
>of Macintosh files (for MacMiNT).  Is this reasonable?  How does one go
>about getting the MiNT developers ok for such things?

Those fields haven't been assigned a specific use yet, but most likely
they will end up encoding extra information about file times (since the
current 2 second granularity really sucks).

I don't think we should use those fields for items like resource fork
sizes that are only applicable to one type of file system (the Mac one).
I think that for file system specific kinds of things, an Fcntl or
Dcntl call is more appropriate.

(Sorry for the delay in responding, things have been *really* hectic
here at work :-( ).

Regards,
Eric