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Re: xattr support in live-installer?



On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 03:19:12PM +0200, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> (2014-04-09):
> > Would it make sense to modify attr to build udebs, then change
> > live-installer to do a getcap/setcap run after transferring files with
> > tar?  I think this is probably going to be simpler than adding xattr
> > support to busybox tar (in GNU tar that depends on a specific archive
> > format, so I'm guessing it's not exactly trivial).  Even if we did go
> > for the latter approach instead, we'd probably still need at least a
> > libattr1-udeb.
> 
> It seems to me that attr is sufficiently small for us not to worry too
> much about adding udebs there and using them in d-i. Patching busybox
> indeed looks less straightforward, and possibly more error-prone.

OK, good, that was my thought too.

In fact getcap/setcap are actually in libcap2, not attr (I'm an idiot),
but that's also tiny.  getfattr/setfattr are more general and seem to
have a more convenient interface from d-i's point of view, though.

The main thing to take care about will be to make sure that we don't
fail to install if the target filesystem doesn't support extended
attributes.  I think this will unfortunately mean that /bin/ping won't
have its setuid bit restored, at least not without lots of
special-casing, but that's still better than a failed install.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]


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