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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] extended attributes


From: Aaron Bentley
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] extended attributes
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 00:16:47 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031205 Thunderbird/0.4

Tom Lord wrote:

   > From: Aaron Bentley <address@hidden>

> Some text editors save-as-tmp-and-rename. This breaks hard links, and I > wonder whether it would also kill extended attributes. I suspect it > would require more attribute-awareness than many apps have.

Which points in the general direction of why extended attributes are
simply an ill-conceived idea.
For myself, I'm not sure of this. While the link-breaking behavior is useful to Arch, I'm tempted to call it a bug. My expectation of an editor is that it doesn't change the properties of the file (e.g ctime, permissions, # of links) -- it just changes its contents (and atime/mtime).

If editors were doing what they say they're doing (changing contents), any extended attributes would naturally be preserved.

I understand that write-and-rename is an attempt to achieve atomic file operations, but maybe it would be better to put atomic file operations into the OS. (Though I can testify that some Microsoft products do write-and-rename, even though MS controls their OS.)

Aaron




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