Garrett D'Amore wrote: > I'm confused. Brian says that archivers Just Work with the current > form, because the attributes are retained. Yet, you're saying that the > attributes are not necessarily retained. Which is it? Right now, > either way, you have an attribute... which I *think* means that the you > need support (which may or may not be present) in the archivers.
I know that some archivers in use today will not create a different bitstream for a reparse point than for a regular symlink, but I believe our intent to set the bit on restore or create means that we don't have to teach all archivers about the new bit. If any Sun-maintained archivers are aware, that's fine, but this should work with GNU tar, too. Logically, that bit is only a way for the NFS/CIFS server code to avoid having to read the symlink data to understand that it's touched a reparse point. We want this because the referral is a two-part deal - we return an "it's not here" error to the client first, and then respond to a followup query later. The sysattr makes an NFSv4 READDIR op able to avoid N accesses to symlink data. Rob T
