Re: tarfs implementation

[Niels Möller]

Tobin Fricke <tobin@splorg.org> writes:

> The Linux "access control list" (acl) and "extended attribute" (ea) people
> have extended the ext2fs format to support extended attributes --
> name/value pairs associated with files. (And the ACL's are stored in EA's)

Oh, sounds like the "property lists on inodes" I have been arguing
about some times. But no matter what everybody is thinking about that,
property lists on inodes as represented in an archive format should be
powerful enough for representing translators and other hurd
extensions, I think. If the values can contain NUL:s, one could store
an argz list directly, otherwise some other encoding is needed.

> EA's are nice because you can associate metadata (like, for example
> "character set" or "mime type") with files.

I agree that seems like a nice thing to have.

The argument against extended attributes is that you can get into a
mess when files lose important attributes when you copy them, or if
you have extended attributes some of which you want plain cp to keep
and others you want cp to discard. In short, "resource forks sucks".

Regards,
/Niels