site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Mar 4, 2006, at 1:42 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: - boyd _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com (BIBA, Port ACLs, whatever) and dealing with EAs/ACLs on a daily basis, but it does beg the question: What problems have they solved along the way and why do the various GNU command-line tools they must be using not support EAs or ACLs yet? We did a search for support like this before hacking the CLI tools ourselves, and we found no apparent attempts to grapple with the problems of EA preservation / transfer. What? I find it difficult to believe that some research into EA preservation did not yield prior work. But that would be heavily dependent upon the timing, as this seems to be an active area of research. Alas. I've attempted to use SELinux for many years, but can't manage the policies in practice, so it was never more than a lab exercise for me. That said, I've long been actively interested in filesystem support for metadata. NTFS allows a large number of "named forks" per file, and they actually have used (well, supported) per-file rich metadata in the Office applications for years now (although for a long time they were bundling the metadata in a FAT-like mini-filesystem inside Office binary files, in order to support the metadata forks on non- NTFS filesystems, so that is rather moot). Any file operations on an NTFS volume would need to preserve this. Although it is not at all clear to me that any attempt is made to do so for POSIX tools like rsync running on Windows on Cygwin. ReiserFS version 4 has extensive support for per-file metadata. They still argue about the best way to represent such metadata, and the pseudo-subdir approach that I've seen some POSIX tools take with Macintosh metadata (e.g. filename/.resourcefork) is quite similar. Hmm. Actually you are correct: no standard tools support these various approaches. Filesystem architects have long grappled with this stuff, but no one has made user-space work well. smime.p7s