Git on Windows maps creation time onto changed time

Dear git,

While tracking down a problem with a filesystem shared by Windows and Ubuntu, I came across the following code in compat/mingw.c (ming_fstat(), also in do_lstat()):

	if (GetFileInformationByHandle(fh, &fdata)) {
		buf->st_ino = 0;
		buf->st_gid = 0;
		buf->st_uid = 0;
		buf->st_nlink = 1;
		buf->st_mode = file_attr_to_st_mode(fdata.dwFileAttributes);
		buf->st_size = fdata.nFileSizeLow |
			(((off_t)fdata.nFileSizeHigh)<<32);
		buf->st_dev = buf->st_rdev = 0; /* not used by Git */
		buf->st_atime = filetime_to_time_t(&(fdata.ftLastAccessTime));
		buf->st_mtime = filetime_to_time_t(&(fdata.ftLastWriteTime));
		buf->st_ctime = filetime_to_time_t(&(fdata.ftCreationTime));
		return 0;
	}

The assignment of buf->st_ctime doesn’t seem right to me. I understand there’s no good choice here, but I think a better choice would be to duplicate the definition used for st_mtime.

Background: When I do a git status on Windows and then later on Ubuntu (or the other order), it is extremely slow, as the entire tree is being traversed. I tracked it down to this difference in definition of c_time. Yes, I know about the core.trustctime variable, but my problem aside this seems like an unwise choice.

Thanks for listening,

K.