> It is a lot of churn though. I think that i_{a,c,m}time shouldn't be accessed directly by filesystems same as no filesystem should really access i_{g,u}id which we also provide i_{g,u}id_{read,write}() accessors for. The mode is another example where really most often should use helpers because of all the set*id stripping that we need to do (and the bugs that we had because of this...). The interdependency between ctime and mtime is enough to hide this in accessors. The other big advantage is simply grepability. So really I would like to see this change even without the type switch. In other words, there's no need to lump the two changes together. Do the conversion part and we can argue about the switch to discrete integers separately. The other adavantage is that we have a cycle to see any possible regression from the conversion. Thoughts anyone?