Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Jan Hudec]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 09:53:51 +0000, Esben Mose Hansen wrote:
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> On Saturday 28 August 2004 00:31, Michael Poole wrote:
> 
> Having lurked at this discussion for some time (I sometimes have to use 
> EBCDIC, the worst encoding ever invented). So I wanted to throw my "solution" 
> on the table :)
> 
> This is what we need, in my opinion.
> 
> 1. Filesystem support for extended attributes (many file systems support this)
> 2. Standard utilities support for extended attributes (cp copies EA etc., tar 
> stores EA, etc.)
> 3. A standard for specifying encoding in EA.
> 4. Make diff, patch and friends aware of this and act accordingly.
> 5. Make tla store these extended attributes and changes together with the 
> files and changessets.

About every sane editor writes the file by:
1) Writing to a temporary file
2) Renaming it in place of the old one
(yes, it is sane -- it's a unix "poor man's atomic commit")
... and where are your precious extended attributes??

Things that are thigs tightly coupled with file's contents should better
be part of the contents. You want cat pass them and cat, by desingn,
does not, and have no way to, pass extended attributes around. Extended
attributes may be used, but as a last resort where nothing else is
possible, not as a standard.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>

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