xattrs: Permission denied?

[Wesley W. Terpstra]

> I've been thus far unable to figure out why this breaks.

There seem to be three distinct problems.

Problem #1: receiver.c:451 calls set_file_attrs before the contents  
of a directory have been created. This resets the writable flag which  
was setup in generator.c to permit creating children. This causes  
files that are children of a read-only directory with extended  
attributes to fail.

Problem #2: generator.c creates directories with mode file->mode. If  
the directory has no contents, the flags are never made writable.  
This causes the call in receiver.c to fail to create the extended  
attributes.

Problem #3: generator.c also calls set_file_attrs early (before  
xattrs are available) which will reset the permissions on directories  
even if #2 is fixed. This is also the point at which the %stat xattr  
gets set.

I think the solution to #2 is to add 0700 to non-root created  
directories and tweak the directory mode always. This will make  
setting the %stat attr in the early set_file_attrs succeed.

#3 must then be taught to leave this mode tweak alone.

  #1 should perhaps only call the set_xattr code, not the whole  
set_file_attrs. After all, the earlier set_file_attrs already dealt  
with permissions.

There also seems to be some race-condition between the generator and  
receiver. I noticed that if I placed sleep commands in the generator  
other things start to fail. I didn't investigate this further.

I can't fix these problems on my own because I barely understand the  
correct order of the operations.

Here is the test case that I'm using:

mkdir y
cd y
touch file1
mkdir no-xattr
mkdir no-xattr-stuff
mkdir xattr
mkdir xattr-stuff
touch no-xattr-stuff/file2
touch xattr-stuff/file3
setfattr -n user.test1 -v foo .
setfattr -n user.test2 -v bar xattr
setfattr -n user.test3 -v baz xattr-stuff
chmod -w * .
cd ..
rsync -aX y z

If you can get this to work. Hats off to you!