Re: [Gnu-arch-users] extended attributes

[Andrew Suffield]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 11:00:20PM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
> 
>     > 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.

It is fairly obvious that you can build that on top of posix extended
attributes. Property lists *do* solve "everything", for the same
reasons that hard drives solve "everything", even though the data that
is stored is not specified in their documentation.

Extended attributes are a generic interface for attaching metadata to
files. You're *supposed* to implement the rest in userspace, and
that's what will probably happen. There's no reason why the filesystem
should implement any of the things you describe.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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