Re: [PATCH] get/set FAT filesystem attribute bits
From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Mon Jan 03 2005 - 17:45:52 EST
Nicholas Miell wrote:
Yeah, I contemplated adding system.fattattrs, system.ntfsattrs, and
system.linuxattrs (for the ext2 attrs that have popped up in several
other filesystems) a while ago, but xattrs seem to be the red-headed
left-handed stepchild of the Linux VFS and I lost interest in the
project.
Nice to see someone else interested in it, though.
>
I'm honestly not sure that using an ASCII string in an xattr is the sane
way of doing this. Even a binary byte in an xattr would make more sense
in some ways.
I think the xattr mechanism is ignored largely because it's painfully
complex.
A plus with using xattr is that in theory (but of course not in
practice!) it would let one store a copy of a DOS filesystem on an ext3
(or xfs, or...) filesystem and have it restored, all using standard (but
by necessity, xattr-aware) tools. However, the splitting of xattr into
namespaces may very well make that impossible, since what's a "system"
attribute to one filesystem is a "user" attribute to another. Classic
design flaw, by the way.
Anyway, I'm going to send out something to the various maintainers of
DOS-based filesystems (FAT, CIFS, NTFS) and see what they think.
-hpa
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