Make --no-mtime default?

[NickSto]

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Do the developers have an opinion on turning on --no-mtime by default?

It's difficult to search for this, so I don't know if this debate has already occurred (I figure it has).

I went years without realizing youtube-dl was artificially setting the date modifieds on my videos to the upload date. It wasn't until I was trawling through the list of options and saw --no-mtime that I realized what happened.

I really like to have a record of when I first found and downloaded a video, and now there's years of videos I've saved where I have no idea what period of my life they're from. The worst part is, it poisoned the date modifieds on all the videos downloaded before that as well. If I see a video with a date from before that period, I don't know if it's actually from then, or if it's one downloaded with youtube-dl with a date that artificially put it back then.

I understand some people like to organize their videos with date modifieds set by the upload date, and that's fine. But I feel like that being the default violates the principle of least surprise, since the vast majority of tools don't operate that way. And it can cause a lot of damage, as I described.

I also understand that suddenly changing defaults can cause even more surprise, so I'm not sure if there's a solution at this point. But I'd love to hear thoughts on this.

[dstftw]

Duplicate of #1709.

[NickSto]

@dstftw Thanks! I figured this must've come up before, but I couldn't find it.

[NickSto]

I saw #1709 was just locked down, but I couldn't tell if there was any response or position taken by the developers.

Just so we know what to expect, are they open to it, not decided, or a definite WONTFIX? Or should I just submit a pull request and see how it shakes out?