File attributes being set in reiserfs partitions

[David Jarvie <lists@astrojar.org.uk>]

Since the latest upgrades to etch a week ago, I've found that file attributes (as 
displayed by lsattr) have been getting set in my reiserfs partitions. According to 
the documentation, file attributes apply only to ext2 file systems. The attributes 
get set randomly on quite a few files, with the 'i' (immutable) and 'a' (append-
only) causing significant trouble since they prevent files being overwritten and 
deleted. I have to log in as root and do a chattr to remove them. Quite often a 
simple thing like checking out an svn branch will fail because a newly checked out 
file or directory will have an attribute set so that it can't be written to.

Something is very wrong if reiserfs file systems don't use file attributes. What has 
changed in etch? How can this be prevented?

--
David Jarvie.