Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Esben Mose Hansen]

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On Saturday 28 August 2004 10:11, Jan Hudec wrote:

> > 1. Filesystem support for extended attributes (many file systems support
> > this) 2. Standard utilities support for extended attributes (cp copies EA
> > etc., tar stores EA, etc.)
> > 3. A standard for specifying encoding in EA.
> > 4. Make diff, patch and friends aware of this and act accordingly.
> > 5. Make tla store these extended attributes and changes together with the
> > files and changessets.
>
> About every sane editor writes the file by:
> 1) Writing to a temporary file
> 2) Renaming it in place of the old one
> (yes, it is sane -- it's a unix "poor man's atomic commit")
> ... and where are your precious extended attributes??

Either copied over from the original file, or lost, dependent on the editor. 
Did I mention 2) above? I do not think, however, that this is tla (or arch)'s 
problem. Thus, I propose to ignore this bit.

>
> Things that are thigs tightly coupled with file's contents should better
> be part of the contents. You want cat pass them and cat, by desingn,
> does not, and have no way to, pass extended attributes around. Extended
> attributes may be used, but as a last resort where nothing else is
> possible, not as a standard.

:) Some will not agree with you. Some will. I could write a long text about 
why, where and how you are wrong, but I find this irrelevant in this context.

More interestingly, do you disagree about 5) above? Should tla handle EA 
"sanely", or simply throw them away? THAT is the interesting discussion in 
this forum. I, for one, believe EAs are here to stay. The support for them 
are slowly trickling up&down the toolchains. I would think i prudent to at 
least consider how tla and arch should handle this.

- -- 
regards, Esben

Homepage: http://www.mosehansen.dk
Signature fingerprint at http://www.mosehansen.dk/about
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