On Jun 18, 2007, at 17:24:23, Brad Boyer wrote:
On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 12:26:57AM +0200, Jörn Engel wrote:
Pointless here means that _I_ don't see the point. Maybe there
are valid uses for extended attributes. If there are, noone has
explained them to me yet.
The users of extended attributes that I've dealt with are ACL
support and SELinux. These both use extended attributes under the
covers. It's just not immediately obvious if you aren't looking.
Yeah, extended attributes are typically used for exactly that:
"attributes" like labels, permissions, encoding, cached file-type,
DOS/Windows/Mac metadata, etc. Sometimes people suggest sticking
icons in there, but that's probably a bad idea. At most stick an
"icon label" attribute which refers to a file "/usr/share/icons/
by_attr/$ICON_LABEL.png". If you're trying to put more than 256
bytes of data in an extended attribute then you're probably doing
something wrong. They're very good for cached attributes (like file-
type) where you don't care if the data is lost by "tar", and they're
reasonable for security-related attributes where you don't want
attribute-unaware programs trying to save and restore them (like
SELinux labels).
Cheers,
Kyle Moffett
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