Re: Extended attributes, Linux and GNOME





*if* they have a kernel that supports them. RH8 doesn't RH9 doesn't. Not distro I know of does. No -STABLE release of FreeBSD does. I doubt
any of the other BSD's do.  Just the people riding the bleeding edge of
Free OS's get these features.

They will do =)

And even if we supported them, relying on them is still bad.  You can't
back ACL's up with most tools available (Acl/ea support is just barely
starting to get into GNU userspace).

Yes. I agree with you that relying on them would be bad. But using them when they are available is a good idea, because it elegantly solves the problem of how to make attributes on files available to several users simultaneously, and assuming backup tools support EAs, they are also backed up along.

It wouldn't at all be bad to see *support* for these in GNOME, just not
*reliance* on them.
Exactly.

Even when free OS's do support these fully, you
still have tons of file-systems that can't handle them at all that GNOME
should be capable of working with.

yep.

In other words, GNOME becomes some driving force that screws over its
users who suddenly find they lose metadata across backups or whatnot,
all for the goal of furthering a technology that's coming along just
fine as is... ?

No. Sean, *read* what I wrote. I say GNOME *should support EAs now*. I do NOT say GNOME *must rely on EAs now*.

Trust me. We can use EAs now. There's nothing with the current metafile method that couldn't be done with an EAs ipmlementation.

Except be reliable.  ;-)

This is the behavior I'd like:

Say you got your /var mounted without EA support, but your /home mounted with EA support.

Nautilus should use .nautilus-metafiles in /var. Nautilus should use EAs in /home. Perhaps Nautilus may keep a copy of the metadata as .nautilus-metafiles in /home, but use EAs as the primary source. So if you decide to downgrade to Red Hat 5.2 tomorrow (exaggeration), everything would still work and your data would be safe.

As you can see, EAs and most other things are per-volume options, not per-computer.


luck,

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