Date:        Thu, 8 Mar 2001 13:55:49 +0100
    From:        Frank van der Linden <fvdl@wasabisystems.com>
    Message-ID:  <20010308135549.A2248@vaasje.org>

  | I think that most people are certainly interested in ACL support.
  | Manpower would be a problem, though, someone has to stand up and
  | actually do it..

I have this kind of less than half baked idea (so far anyway) to
add "associated files" to inodes - that is, to allow a file to
have almost any number of other kinds of data attached to it.

The data would be just another file, so in a way every file would
be a directory, though probably not with names, but with types, that
is, if some of the associated data was an ACL, then what the kernel would
want is to find acls associated with this file, not to find "foobar".

Linking to a file this way would increase the inode ref count of course,
so the named file could then be unlinked if desired.

There are a whole bunch of issues associated with this - and I'm not sure
it would work, but the idea is basically fundamentally simple.

Actually making an ACL system on top of this ought then be fairly easy
(assuming some kind of suitable ACL language can be designed).

Apart from ACLs, this could store stuff like dump/archive history,
or macintosh type "forks" or almost anything else that it makes sense
to have all linked together with a file.

kre