On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 04:23:34PM +0000, Eduardo Horvath wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Feb 2012, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> > We ahve two extended attributes API in tree: one from FreeBSD and one from
> > Linux. We are about to toss the FreeBSD one in favor of the Linux one.
> > That is easy now since we never had working extended attributes in a
> > release.
>
> In order to have a sane conversation about what type of extended
> attributes we want to support it would be nice to know why we need them in
> the first place. How are they going to be used? What filesystems will be
> supporting them? What happens when files with extended attributes get
> copied across different filesystems?
Fwiw, the example from the man page is:
setextattr system md5 `md5 -q /boot/kernel/kernel` /boot/kernel/kernel
I would expect that one of the use cases of extended attributes is to allow
a user to tag a file or directory with an arbitrary value. e.g. something like
setextattr mycategory "red bucket" ./foo.txt
eric
