unpack_smb_acl unknown error, + rsync maintainability

[Matt McCutchen]

On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 16:59 -0500, Mike Bombich wrote:
> Regardless, rsync shouldn't be converting uuid to uid/gid for Mac OS  
> X, it's unnecessary.

This is really a question of whether Mac users expect users/groups to be
preserved by uid/gid or by uuid.  Are you saying it makes more sense to
preserve by uuid?  What would --numeric-ids do?

More broadly, I don't think it's a scalable approach to continue adding
ad-hoc workarounds to rsync for the quirks of various filesystems.  It
would be better to have a filesystem-specific component that exposes all
the metadata it knows about as named attributes (gvfs-info does
something like this) and let the core file-copy tool focus on
efficiently transferring and flexibly manipulating that representation.
But such extensible design seems to be uncharacteristic of the current
rsync codebase.  Maybe it would be better to pursue this idea in a new
tool along the lines of rZync and superlifter.

-- 
Matt