Re: [Gnu-arch-users] extended attributes

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Andrew Suffield <address@hidden>


    > On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 11:27:22AM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
    > >     > 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.

    > > Abstractly, all that attributes give you in the filesystem is a way to
    > > bundle a bunch of names under a single common name such that a single
    > > inode can be used to address them all.  Directories already do that.

    > That costs you atomicity, specifically atomic update.

On some operations and not others -- same (but for a different set of
operations) as with extended attributes.   Meanwhile, popular
implementations of extended attributes give you severe size limits and
a flat-namespace of attributes.   So, what the heck -- yeah, there's a
bunch of random differences -- they aren't _perfectly_ isomorphic:
just close enough to make no difference.

I'll grant you that there's a good chance people will, in fact, build
lots of userspace tools to use extended attributes.   That won't
happen because extended attributes _enabled_ these tools --- only
because it took conking people over the head with the general idea
before they'd take it up.

-t