Hello, I'm new to this list (subscription still pending, please CC), and have some questions about the xattr patch from James Antill of Red Hat that I couldn't find any answers to in the mailing list (searched for "xattr").
Are there any plans to incorporate the xattr support into the upstream version of GNU tar? If not, are there specific objections to that patch that could be fixed in order to make it acceptable, or are there alternate plans to provide xattr support? I'm personally less interested in ACL support, and not at all in SELinux support, so if there are objections to those specifically, would there be a chance to accept just the basic xattr support (user.* and trusted.* namespaces)? After the patch posting by James last year (Mar 27, 2007 "Xtar deficiency") the only reply was from Jörg Schilling of star saying the patch "looked non-portable", but no specifics. On a related note, what are people's thoughts to change the aforementioned tar+xattr code so that files had the xattrs set on them _before_ the data was written into the file? This makes sense from the point of tar, because the xattr data is stored earlier in the archive, instead of having to save it in memory until the file data is written. We hope to use this for Lustre (a GPL clustered filesystem for Linux, commonly used in HPC clusters) in order to have the ability to use xattrs to save and restore the file layout (i.e. on which server(s) the file is stored) before the data is written to disk. In the near future, pNFS will have a similar desire to be able to restore the file layout from a backup before the data is written to the server(s). Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.