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

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Ethan Benson <address@hidden>

    > it would seem emacs is broken in the way it edits files anyway, if you
    > turn off backup files it works fine, if you don't things like ACLs and
    > xattr are destroyed.

For the kinds of uses of xattrs under consideration, there is no
correct behavior that emacs might implement.

I suppose that what we "need", on top of xattrs, if they're to be used
in these ways by applications -- is _more_ xattrs and standards
surrounding them.  For example, a standard attribute to say what
xattrs emacs should delete if it turns an inode into a backup file and
which it should copy if it makes a replacement for the original file.

I'm not sure what `mv' and `cp' should do.   Minimally, of course, you
just let the user say which attributes to treat which ways -- but that
seems unweildy once we have 10 applications, each of which might be
defining xattrs.   So, maybe we need a taxonomy of intentions --
official reasons for running `mv' and `cp' -- and xattrs that map each
possible reason onto a rule for which attributes are copied, deleted,
modified, etc.

But you know, those rule-attributes trying to describe how to manage
attributes -- they'll all be duplicated across many files.  That's
inefficient.  And good heavens help me if I want to change a rule
globally.  Maybe we need a system-wide registry for attribute groups
and user-action intension groups.

When in doubt, add an additional associative table -- that always
solves everything.

-t