On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 08:26:53AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > Wang Sheng-Hui has sent some patches that change listxattr for the extN > file systems to return ENODATA when an inode has no extended attributes > (instead of zero). > > I've noted that neither btrfs nor XFS do this, and would have rejected > the patches on that basis. However, I'll note the man page for the > listxattr(2) syscall is ambiguous: > > On success, a positive number is returned indicating the size of the > extended attribute name list. On failure, -1 is returned and errno is > set appropriately. > > It states that on success a _positive_ number is returned. I've looked > and this wordining is in SGI's man page as well. I suspect the man page > should be corrected to sate that "non-negative" number is returned? Samba calls listxattr() when deciding what EA's are present on a file. Right now examining our code I think we'd survive a return of -1/ENODATA on an absense of EA's, but it's a risky change to make for existing applications. Keeping consistency with btrfs and XFS would seem to be a better idea (IMHO). Jeremy. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
