Re: bin/55815: tar opens device files

[Christos Zoulas <christos%zoulas.com@localhost>]

Unfortunately it looks like implementing a no-side-effects open for some devices is 
difficult because those devices (tapes in particular) rely on the different semantics 
for open depending on different minor numbers. As joerg mentions, deferring this 
to the first I/O would be a good thing but it is not trivial to do and we have a bunch 
of them. What we seem to want is an open() flavor that gives us access just to the
extended attributes and stat info, so we could just do that (open O_EXTATTR)?

christos