Re: [Acl-devel] Moving attr(5) man page to man-pages

[Andreas Grünbacher]

2015-04-22 13:58 GMT+02:00 Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <address@hidden>:
>>> I've made a number of edits to the page. Some of these were just
>>> to bring the page closer to man-pages style,
>>
>> The \(em dashes don't render in terminals very well.
>
> What's the problem? (Many existing pages use \(em dashes
> so this change was just for consistency.)

It's just ugly; there isn't a big difference between a hyphen and an em-dash.

>> In addition, I would remove the list of file systems with extended
>> attribute support; they are supported pretty much everywhere to some
>> degree at least, even on  tmpfs.
>
> Fair enough. I see your patch does that.
>
>> I'm attaching a patch that also includes a few other minor changes.
>
> Thanks! Applied.
>
> By the way, the piece
>
>     The list of attribute names that can be returned is also
>     limited to 64 kB.
>
> Is a limitation that affects listxattr(2), right? Maybe I should add
> a sentence on that point to that page.

Yes, thanks.

> Also, what does this mean is someone (tries to) create(s) more than
> 64 kB of attribute names on a file? Do you get an error on setxattr(),
> or is it the case that some names are unretrievable?
>
> Hmm... some light testing (using XFS) suggests that one can create
> more than 64 kB of attribute names, but then listxattr() fails
> with E2BIG. That seems like a sad corner case :-(.

That's what will happen, yes. I don't have a good idea how to fix this.

Andreas