Re: [Bug-tar] patches for acl, xattrs, and selinux support

[Tim Kientzle]

Andreas Dilger wrote:
> If all of the xattrs are backed up, there is still a whitelist for the
> restore step, and in the worst case the user will have to update to a newer
> tar (or edit the code and recompile) to restore their data.  Ideally, there
> would be a default list of attributes to restore, and users could specify
> via arguments which xattrs to restore if they have some specific requirement.

This makes a lot of sense.

I suspect it will be very difficult to restore anything
other than "user" attributes by default.  System and filesystem
attributes can carry a lot of surprises, especially when
porting data across different OSes (or even just different
filesystems or different kernel revisions).

> > > - Change the restoration of xattrs to be before any file data is written.
> > >  This allows the xattrs to contain layout hints, ...
> >
> > I can't think of any problems with this, esp. if you just move the
> > xattrs and not ACLs/SELinux too ...

True, as long as the xattrs don't include security
information that would break the rest of the restore.

Tim Kientzle