Why does ls report wrong creation date on symlinks?

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<<On Fri, 30 Dec 1994 16:18:52 -0500, Chuck Bacon <crtb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

> I had previously noted that all directories in a MSDOSFS tree carry
> as their creation date, the current moment.  Somebody suggested that
> this was a capricious choice, in view of the impossibility of
> duplicating the creation date which DOS would report.  I wonder
> if there is a link between these two bugs.

None whatsoever.  

The POSIX definition of symbolic links is written to allow them to be
directory entries, and the 4.4 code simulates this.  All the
traditional ``inode'' values of symbolic links are ignored, and system
calls always return the values from the parent directory.

-GAWollman

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