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

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hi Andreas,

On 04/22/2015 02:16 PM, Andreas Grünbacher wrote:
> 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.

:-(. Okay, I've documented that error in listxattr(2) and added
a BUGS section pointing out that corner case.

Thanks,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/