Re: extattr namespaces

[Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 04:23:34PM +0000, Eduardo Horvath wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Feb 2012, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> > We ahve two extended attributes API in tree: one from FreeBSD and one from 
> > Linux. We are about to toss the FreeBSD one in favor of the Linux one. 
> > That is easy now since we never had working extended attributes in a 
> > release.
> 
> In order to have a sane conversation about what type of extended 
> attributes we want to support it would be nice to know why we need them in 
> the first place.  How are they going to be used?  What filesystems will be 
> supporting them?  What happens when files with extended attributes get 
> copied across different filesystems?

Fwiw, the example from the man page is:
    setextattr system md5 `md5 -q /boot/kernel/kernel` /boot/kernel/kernel

I would expect that one of the use cases of extended attributes is to allow
a user to tag a file or directory with an arbitrary value.  e.g. something like
    setextattr mycategory "red bucket" ./foo.txt

eric