Re: Extended attributes, Linux and GNOME

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Sean Middleditch wrote:
>
> While I wholly agree that these could be an awesome thing for desktops,
> the problem is really a lack of full support.  No released stable Linux
> kernel has support, no vendor kernel has support.  And even then, most
> users won't have them.  Those that do, still have to contend with the
> fact that the GNU tools most of us have suck in that they can't support
> these extensions.  Also notice how a good deal of popular of software
> will lose/corrupt these attributes on files without modification.
> 
> Maybe once the user-space tools are more up-to-date, acl's/attr's are in
> more Linux released/user-used kernels, FreeBSD5 is more prevalent (it
> has acl/attr support in 5.0), etc. the Free Desktops can rely on these
> features in Free OS's (which commercial OS's have had for years, in many
> cases.)


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.

	Sander

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