Extended attributes in MacOS X

[Wayne Davison]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 05:58:45AM -0400, Victor Shoup wrote:
> I'm wondering, though:  does the xattr code avoid copying, or even
> comparing hashes of, the xattr data itself?  Especially on OSX there
> can be a  lot of this stuff, and it would be nice if changes in the
> xattr's were detected quickly  by looking at something like modtime
> and filesize, just like for regular files.

No, this is one of the biggest deficiencies of the current xattr code,
and is definitely something that would need to be changed before it
would be merged into the trunk.  The current code transmits all the
xattr data as part of the file-list data, so if there is a ton of it,
it will be slow.

..wayne..