Re: [Bug-tar] Suprising behavior of extract with --xattrs

[Pavel Raiskup]

On Monday, June 3, 2019 10:27:12 PM CEST Brian Murray wrote:
> When enabling extended attribute support in a tar file (--xattrs) all
> extended attributes are stored in the archive, however when the same archive
> is extracted only the user.* extended attributes are extracted. To have all
> the extended attributes read and applied on extraction one must also use the
> '--xattrs-include=*' option.

This decision was done because only user.* attributes are 100% safe to
extract.  The security.* (especially capabilities) can have some binary
format specific to the box creating the archive but incompatible with host
extracting the archive.

For security.selinux there is special option --selinux (so xattr
security.selinux can be ignored), and for security.capability there should
be implemented some new option (probably using libcap.so?).

> I find this behavior surprising and especially so given that the documentation
> indicates that "By default, when `--xattr' is used, all names are stored
> in the archive (or extracted, if using `--extract')"[1].

Probably the docs need an update then.

Pavel