homepage

Guido proposed st_atime_ns et al. I'll make an alternate proposal.
I'd like to avoid tying ourselves to ns resolution. As MvL said: "I don't want to deal with this issue *again* in my lifetime".
If all we want is to facilitate copying the exact metadata from os.stat to os.utime, then we don't really care about conveniently modifying the timestamp. So I propose we use MvL's suggestion of a tuple of ints. Either (numerator, denominator) or (seconds, fractional_numerator, fractional_denominator). (These are mentioned in PEP 410 under the heading "Tuple of ints" as options A and B respectively.) Name the fields with the suffix "_exact" (e.g. st_mtime_exact). os.stat and its ilk produce it; os.utime and its ilk consume it. If people want to monkey with the values and do math, let 'em--consenting adults.