Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: give us a hand with arch

[Harald Meland]

[Ethan Benson]

> my suggestion would be to extract the .arch-ids tags into an xattr if
> possible, and otherwise do it just as explicit works now.  the tag
> should be the same data, its location would be the only difference in
> some cases.

I'm not comfortable with the "if possible" part of this suggestion.
Even if the user's file system supports xattrs, the tools used might
still cause nasty surprises.

For example, on this Debian box Emacs is by default set up to create
backup files by renaming.  While I'm not claiming to have looked very
closely at xattr semantics, I would guess that

  rename(file, file~)
  open(file)
  ... write new contents ...
  close(file)

would leave the user with the original file-id xattr in file~ (which
by default would be ignored by tla), and no corresponding xattr in
file.  This would be bad.
-- 
Harald