Re: user xattr support

[James Youngman]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Leslie P. Polzer
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi,

Hello Leslie, it's good to hear from you again after so much time.
Sorry, I didn't notice this email!

> I've noticed that the extended attribute support I coded
> three years ago hasn't made it into mainline yet.

Ultimately the problem is that three different things were mixed up
together: the ARG_MAX improvements for xargs (which is included these
days, thank you), the xattr change, and (IIRC) the other extended
attribute change.

This generated a big patch and it was difficult to tease the strands
apart.   If I recall correctly, my idea at the time was to apply the
ARG_MAX change and then try to work on the syntax of the extended
attribute code to make sure that we were doing things consistently
with other (especially tools) supporting extended attributes.

> Is there a special reason for that? I might be able to put
> in a couple of hours to help get it merged.

I fear that it may be more than a couple of hours work, but the most
helpful thing to do with those patches would be to tease them apart
and rebase them against current head (which is findutils 4.5.x).   The
most helpful thing you could do overall of course would be to propose
fixes (and tests) for the release-blocking bugs listed on Savannah.

Thanks,
James.

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