[Gluster-devel] AFR conservative merge portability

[Jeff Darcy]

> Here is a proposal: we know that at the end of conservative merge, we
> should end up with the situation where directory ctime/mtime is the
> ctime of the most recently added children.

Won't the directory mtime change as the result of a rename or unlink?
Neither of those would be reflected in the children's times (in the
unlink case the child no longer exists).

> And fortunately, as
> conservative merge happens, parent directory ctime/mtime are updated on
> each child addition, and we finish in the desired state.
> 
> In other words, after conservative merge, parent directory metadata
> split brain for only ctime/mtime can just be cleared by AFR without any
> harm.

Is there *any* case, not even necessarily involving conservative merge,
where it would be harmful to propagate the latest ctime/mtime for any
replica of a directory?