support for ext-attrs on non-supporting FS's

Linda A. Walsh rsync at tlinx.org
Mon Aug 24 23:09:47 MDT 2009


FUSE runs on windows?  

It was from cygwin to a CIFS (Samba machine) -- problem is
that cygwin's view of CIFS is pretty limited -- (apparently) since
CIFS supports the extended windows attributes (like the Zone code that
stores where files have come from when you download them) -- and the
underlying XFS supports extended file attrs as well, but Samba doesn't
use the -- it stores them as separate 'terds' on the Linux machine (though
I'm  told that will change in the next (maybe current) version).

It's just cygwin -- that has problems -- it can't even speak UTF-8 without
an occasional hiccup, though it does alot better now than it did last time I tried it.  At least I can set my codepage in 'bash' to 65001, and not have
the cygwin-bash window completely freeze up on me -- in fact the tty version of vim in cygin read UTF just fine.  So far only, thought UTF-8 is sketchy -- 
the graphical vim (under cygwin-X) displays garbage in UTF-8 mode, and some of the cmd-line utils don't like it too well.  

But extended attributes?  Most of the gnu utils aren't there yet, so I 
wouldn't expect cygwin to jump ahead of them.  Could happen, but....its not
like cygwin is a full distro -- just a compat layer on top of win.




Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 09:43 -0700, Linda A. Walsh wrote:
>> Maybe rsync could support extattrs on non-supporting fs's with a 
>> .<fn>.xattr  file stored
>> at the same place as the <fn>:
>>     If a user used a switch to emulate 'xattrs', then on a fs that 
>> didn't support real .xattrs one
>> could still ACL and other .xattr info.  If a user ran rsync w/o that 
>> switch such files
>> would be treated as 'normal files' -- allowing copying as normal files 
>> between other
>> targets, but allowing ACL restoration on some final target by re using 
>> the --emulate
>> switch, where it would detect the files on the source, and support on a 
>> target, and
>> set ACL's appropriately?
>>
>> Just a thought....?  Doable or reasonable?
> 
> I think the xattr emulation would be more appropriately done in a
> virtual filesystem to be layered over the real one (e.g., with FUSE)
> than in rsync.
> 


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