Re: Extended attributes, Linux and GNOME

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 10:09, Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:
> >
> >
> >On ACL-s, yes, having ACL support in GNOME would be awesome. Using the
> >attributes extension is more questionable - portability is still very low,
> >there is no network file system (nfs or otherwise) support, and very many
> >people would still have kernels that don't have the support. Having attrs
> >be compulsory would probably hurt gnome use / upgrades a lot.
> >
> For those cases where EA doesn't work, GNOME must fall back to the 
> standard .nautilus-metafile.  Wherever they work, they should be used as 
> the primary metadata store.

I'm still convinced that if EA's are used for any data any time soon,
the old metafiles should *also* be updated.  Even if my local
file-system/kernel have EA support (which mine do), that doesn't help
for the fact that the standard GNU utils don't support them for backups,
or even basic file moving.  (I.e., if I copy a folder from one partition
to another using cp, and the dest folder has no EA support, cp will just
lose the EA's - we can't always rely on Nautilus "exporting" it for us,
since scripts/utilities/etc. just plain don't support it.)

Once EA's are more common on all major Linux/BSD file-systems (all the
big commercial UNIX's have them, right?) and the changes of basic
file-operations destroying the meta-data are relatively small, I
wouldn't object at all to losing the safer .nautilus-metafile store.