Xattr on FreeBSD ... Good Luck ?

[Wesley W. Terpstra]

On Nov 1, 2006, at 9:57 PM, Ensel Sharon wrote:
> I couldn't help noticing this during the configure:
>
> checking whether to support extended attributes... Xattrs requested  
> but
> not linux.  Good luck

 From what I've just been reading about FreeBSD extended attributes,  
it's not going to work for you, as is.
I'm working on a patch for FreeBSD using this page as a reference:  
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=extattr&format=html
Be aware, however, that this stuff is extremely alpha!

> Note the last line ... if my goal is to have OSX clients rsyncing  
> their
> extended attributes files on to my FreeBSD 6.1 UFS2 filesystem ...  
> is that
> a reasonable thing to be attempting ?

Attempting? Sure. Succeeding? You'll need to help out! =D

> The xattrs code has been ported to work with OS X, so it shouldn't be
> hard to add the code necessary to get it to work with FreeBSD.

Unfortunately, it appears the API is completely different.
Give me a half hour! :-)

According to wikipedia [1], linux, freebsd, solaris, and osx support  
extended attributes.
It seems a worthy (and achievable) goal to get them working on all of  
these platforms, if we have people who can test the support.

Wayne, I think it was a mistake to add an OS% infront of extended  
attributes from MacOS. I think we should just leave them unescaped. I  
also think the extended attribute for fake-super should just be  
"RSync.stat" [2]. I really think this should be fixed BEFORE 2.6.9!  
Otherwise people who use the patch as it is right now will have made  
bad backups if it's changed later.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Attributes
[2] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes