Support for extended file attributes in userland tools

[Alex <alxmrnk%gmail.com@localhost>]

Userland tools (apart for a couple of them) do not currently support
extended file attributes. This greatly impairs their usefulness.
Needless to say, if I save some important metadata as an extended
attribute, I will naturally expect to have it preserved by, say, an
archiver. But this is not so (yet), and I may even risk losing
precious data without realizing it!

Is support for extended attributes across userland tools planned in
the near future?
Please, I need to know, because I am planning to adopt NetBSD but this
thing is holding me back.

I know that I have no right to demand anything of the developers, who
already are putting in a huge amount of work in the free time, and are
doing a swell job in so many areas, and I fully realize that extended
attributes may not have a very high priority, but I still hope that my
request for EA support will be kept into consideration. At least,
could someone please add EA support to tar as a first step?

Thanks in advance

Alex