Message-ID: <41D9F5FB.7080204@zytor.com>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:48:43 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: Nicholas Miell <nmiell@comcast.net>
CC: tridge@samba.org, Michael B Allen <mba2000@ioplex.com>, sfrench@samba.org,
       linux-ntfs-dev@lists.sourceforge.net, samba-technical@lists.samba.org,
       aia21@cantab.net, hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: FAT, NTFS, CIFS and DOS attributes
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Nicholas Miell wrote:
> 
> The design isn't broken, you're just missing an important detail of what
> the system namespace entails:
> 
> xattrs in the system namespace have a format defined by the kernel and
> (more importantly -- this is the important detail) modify kernel
> behavior.
> 
> If the xattr namespace was flat, I would have no way of knowing whether
> or not the kernel will set the Archived bit in fatattrs (or DosAttrib)
> xattr when I write to a file that has that xattr or whether or not the
> kernel will choose to enforce the ACL I store in the posix_acl_access
> xattr.
> 
> With the system namespace, I can rely on the fact that xattrs in that
> namespace actually have a meaning and are in sync with what the kernel
> believes to be true about the file.
> 

What you're neglecting is that there is a LARGE class of metadata where 
the important thing is that you store them; if you don't know what they 
are you merely ignore them and keep them as-is.

There is no place for those in the current design.

	-hpa
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