Re: BeFS or BFS or other filesystem for linux with attributes on debian

[Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 11:07 AM, Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 11:03:36AM -0800, Dan Hitt wrote:
>> Awesome, Tomas, awesome.
>>
.....
>> But obviously the attr program has programmatic access to the
>> attributes, so presumably all i need to do is hunt down its code and
>> look at it.
>>
> apt-cache search libattr
>
> Looks like C/C++ and Python are the best choices.
>
> Regards,
>
> -Roberto
>
> --
> Roberto C. Sánchez
>

Thanks Roberto, for the info, and also for demoing more of the apt
capabilities.  From your command it looks like perl also has support
for attributes, and i think that for any other scripting language you
could just shell out to the attr program as needed.

Just for reference, although the attributes exist and i ithink are
exactly what i need, it looks like the system has to be nudged a
little to use them.

So, for example, with cp, you need to do 'cp -a' to carry along the
attributes ('cp -p' is not enough).

Also, it looks like tar has to be told about the attributes both on
the way in and on the way out:
tar --xattr -cf my_archive.tar my_file
tar --xattr -xf my_archive.tar

It would be nice if the system could be told to use attributes by default.

But that's a very small nit compared to the value of having attributes.

It sure seems like a big win to be able to skip devising ways to
encode attributes into a file format.

(And it looks like the system we're using originated at SGI, then
through Red Hat (Andreas Gruenbacher).  So glad it was kept alive and
passed along!)

dan