id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
27644	Document FileSystemStorage.get_created_time() limitation on Unix	Jonathan Verner	Ingo Klöcker	"The method {{{get_created_time}}} uses {{{os.path.getctime}}} which only returns the creation time on Windows. On Unix it returns the **change time** , i.e. the last time the inode attributes were modified (see [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/237079/how-to-get-file-creation-modification-date-times-in-python]). The documentation says that 
    For storage systems unable to return the creation time this will raise NotImplementedError
so the correct behaviour would be, IHMO, to raise a {{{NotImplementedError}}} on Unix platforms. I am not sure whether the method is used anywhere---searching on github only came up with uses in tests, docs and the place where it is defined. Also, as noted by a commenter on the above stackoverflow question, it doesn't seem to be a useful value anyway:
	
    Frankly, file creation time is usually fairly useless. When you open an existing file for write with mode ""w"", it's not replacing it, it just     opens the existing file and truncates it. Even though the file contents are completely unrelated to whatever it had on creation, you'd still be told the file was ""created"" well before the current version. Conversely, editors that use atomic replace on save (original file is replaced by new work-in-progress temp file) would show a more recent creation date, even if you just deleted one character. Use the modification time, don't grub for creation time.

So it might make sense to remove the method altogether."	Cleanup/optimization	closed	Documentation	1.10	Normal	fixed			Accepted	1	0	0	0	0	0