Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: give us a hand with arch

[Ethan Benson]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 12:59:51AM +0200, Harald Meland wrote:
> [Ethan Benson]
> 
> > my suggestion would be to extract the .arch-ids tags into an xattr if
> > possible, and otherwise do it just as explicit works now.  the tag
> > should be the same data, its location would be the only difference in
> > some cases.
> 
> I'm not comfortable with the "if possible" part of this suggestion.
> Even if the user's file system supports xattrs, the tools used might
> still cause nasty surprises.
> 
> For example, on this Debian box Emacs is by default set up to create
> backup files by renaming.  While I'm not claiming to have looked very
> closely at xattr semantics, I would guess that
> 
>   rename(file, file~)
>   open(file)
>   ... write new contents ...
>   close(file)
> 
> would leave the user with the original file-id xattr in file~ (which
> by default would be ignored by tla), and no corresponding xattr in
> file.  This would be bad.

no, rename() supports xattr.

unpatched mv(1) doesn't break xattrs. (it uses rename())

however file copying requires xattr support.

in any event it should be configurable somehow, so if the user doesn't
want xattrs used they won't be.

i was mainly pointing out that filesystems don't have to be rewritten,
and we don't have to switch to HorribleFileSystemPlus from apple to
get resource fork crap, xattrs are here and would work for something
like this, but as you say userland tools are probably not really ready
for such a thing.

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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