I'm afraid I don't understand.  What dates are we setting, precisely?

The metadata associated with the file that is being saved. "Date created", "Date modified", "Date accessed".

When saving a file, Gnumeric saves the file with the current date and time for all 3 of these, but creation date should not be changing.

Morten, I believe Jeremy is speaking about the information we are showing in the file tab of the document properties dialog. AS far as I know we are never setting those items but just retrieve them fromt eh operating system.

In linux the "Created" date is always "unknown", since we only know the "last modified" and "last accessed" date. I suspect on MS Windows there is also a creation date.

Hm, I just opened an xls file (on Linux). It shows a creation, modified and last accessed date and they are all distinct. If I modify the file and resave it it none of them change. This is obviously not correct.

This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.

That's great news!
Thank you for all your work and for making Gnumeric such a great application.

Andreas: this caused minor complications for the test suite: I had to blank
out the date before checking if the generated documents were right.

See t59??.pl

Morten in the moment we are setting the creation-date on every new gnumeric file (the modification date is only set if we really modify the file, which should not be the case for any of these tests.)

Since we technically do not "create" the document when importing/opening a file we could mit the creation date when opening/importing the file. Currently if the file contains a creation date it will override our creation date anyways.)