[plug] Alternative Data Streams (From OT)

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 01:14:47PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
| But this is basically storing metadata and it's probably better to use
| a new API in any case.

There already is an extended attribute system supported by XFS with a
semi-standard API.  man 5 attr suggests that ext3 supports it too, but
it doesn't work on my machine so perhaps it's a new thing for 2.6
kernels.  Doesn't seem to work on reiserfs either.

| The disadvantage of using '/' as the separator is that you couldn't move
| forked files from one filesystem to the next -- you would have to split
| them up into separate files.

But surely you wouldn't be able to move files with forks between
fork-supporting filesytems and non-fork-supporting filesystems anyway?
And presumably tools like cp, etc would have to be modified to deal with
forked files no matter how they are implemented[1]?  Or maybe I'm just
misunderstanding you.

Cameron.

[1] fileutils, for instance, currently links to libattr and libacl so
that it can handle files with (XFS-style) extended attributes and ACLs.

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