Extended attributes and archives (tar, cpio, mpax, makefs...)

[Emmanuel Dreyfus <manu%netbsd.org@localhost>]

It may be desirable to save extended attributes in archives, at least
if that does not change the format. I am not planning to work on it 
right now, but it would be nice to have a clear idea of EA status.

cp -p and mv now try to preserve extended attributes in -current. 
I am testing a patch for a pullup later.

I see that libarchive (cpio and tar) has support for Linux <xattr.h>
API (we implement it). Anyone knows if enabling it would make the format
incompatible?

pax and makefs seems to have no support at all for EA. Anyone knows if
the format could handle that without making it binary incompaible?

I am not sure it is worth the trouble looking at rcp. scp does not know
about EA, but would it be desirable to change that?

And on the pkgsrc front, I see rsync uses <sattr.h>, so if someone 
want to enable it (perhaps it is already automatically enabled, I did not 
tried).

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu%netbsd.org@localhost