Re: file forks vs. xattr (was: xattr names for unprivileged stacking?)

Dr. David Alan Gilbert
2020-08-27T16:29:53Z

* Al Viro (viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk) wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 04:23:24PM +0200, Christian Schoenebeck wrote:
>
> > Be invited for making better suggestions. But one thing please: don't start
> > getting offending.
> >
> > No matter which delimiter you'd choose, something will break. It is just about
> > how much will it break und how likely it'll be in practice, not if.
>
> ... which means NAK. We don't break userland without very good reasons and
> support for anyone's pet feature is not one of those. It's as simple as
> that.

I'm curious how much people expect to use these forks from existing
programs - do people expect to be able to do something and edit a fork
using their favorite editor or cat/grep/etc them?

I say that because if they do, then having a special syscall to open
the fork wont fly; and while I agree that any form of suffix is a lost
cause, I wonder what else is possible (although if it wasn't for the
internal difficulties, I do have a soft spot for things that look like
both files and directories showing the forks; but I realise I'm weird
there).

Dave

> > If you are concerned about not breaking anything: keep forks disabled.
>
> s/disabled/out of tree/
>
> One general note: the arguments along the lines of "don't enable that,
> then" are either ignorant or actively dishonest; it really doesn't work
> that way, as we'd learnt quite a few times by now. There's no such
> thing as "optional feature" - *any* feature, no matter how useless,
> might end up a dependency (no matter how needless) of something that
> would force distros to enable it. We'd been down that road too many
> times to keep pretending that it doesn't happen.
>
--
Dr. David Alan Gilbert / dgilbert@redhat.com / Manchester, UK