Re: [Gnu-arch-users] extended attributes

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Aaron Bentley <address@hidden>

    > >Which points in the general direction of why extended attributes are
    > >simply an ill-conceived idea.

    > For myself, I'm not sure of this.   While the link-breaking behavior is 
    > useful to Arch, I'm tempted to call it a bug.  My expectation of an 
    > editor is that it doesn't change the properties of the file (e.g ctime, 
    > permissions, # of links) -- it just changes its contents (and 
atime/mtime).

    > If editors were doing what they say they're doing (changing contents), 
    > any extended attributes would naturally be preserved.

Are you sure?  Extended attributes have no particular semantics.
There's no rule to say when they should be copied and when not, when
they should modified and when not.   They are an example of the
"property lists solve _everything_!" class of design errors.


-t