Are there instances where modification time is not supposed to change?

[Markus Lindholm]

Hi

Today I was updating the meta data for my music collection that's
encoded in flac. I was using easyTag version 1.99.13 to modify the id
tags.

After I was done with the tags I wanted to backup the collection with
rsync. It was now that I noticed that it didn't backup some of the
files that I knew I had modified. I checked the size and time of
modification for the files and they were identical between source and
target, but the time wasn't today. So that was the reason rsync hadn't
backup those file.

So I ran a test where I checked the time of modification for a flac
file, then opened it in easyTag and removed a single letter from a
single tag, saved the change. Checked the time of modification and
noticed that it hadn't changed, but the time of access had changed.
Opened up the flac file with another tag editor and verified that the
change I made with easyTag was actually there.

Is this excepted behaviour?

Regards
Markus
Ps. it's a ext3 file system