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

Al Viro
2020-08-27T14:45:55Z

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.

> 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.