The case materials say that this case will be allowing extensible
attributes to be added presumably by any vendor/application writer that
wants to add an attribute to a file. Discussion on this topic has
implied that there will be no registration of extensible attributes
because registration is complex, slow, etc. The case materials also
state that utilities, including ls(1), will be modified to display all
of the attributes associated with a file.
Since there is no registration of attributes and none of the new
interfaces being added here provide a textual description of the
attributes, how is ls supposed to be able to display the attributes (at
least those that are not included in this case) in any manner that will
have any meaning to someone looking at the output from ls?
Is it really going to help anyone if all ls can say is something like
-rw-r--r-- (--SA--------) 1 dwc staff 5771 Jun 7 11:35 file
Unknown Attributes: 0x00647763:00000002, 0x00647763:00000008,
0x00647763:00000040, 0x00647763:00000800
when it encounters unknown extensible attributes?
- Don
