Extended attributes in MacOS X

Wesley W. Terpstra wesley at terpstra.ca
Wed Oct 25 15:57:38 GMT 2006


I've written a patch to 2.6.8 which adds extended attribute support  
to rsync. This is not like the plethora of patches which try to  
separate osx meta-data into a  special appledouble file (._filename).  
Instead, it builds on patches/xattr.patch and just adds support for  
the MacOS equivalent.

The good news:
1. It works fine locally and to a remote mac
2. It also preserves the finder info and resource fork (these are  
exposed as EAs com.apple.{Finder,ResourceFork})

The bad news:
1. EAs on MacOS need not begin with 'user.' like they do on linux.  
Therefore, I can't backup from a mac->linux machine. However, linux- 
 >mac->linux works fine since the Mac preserves the 'user.' namespace.
2. 2.6.9pre2 has some sort of bug where it zeros out the datum_len of  
the last rsync_xa in a file. I suspect a buffer overrun somewhere,  
but couldn't find it, so my patch doesn't work on 2.6.9pre2.

My question: is this useful? should I prefix all MacOS EAs with 'user.'?



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