Re: Portability of libattr

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 08:41:08PM +0200, petr.pisar@atlas.cz wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm adding support for extended atributes into few applications.
> Unfortunatetally API for EA manipulation is not standartized and every
> operating system uses its own solution. I thought libattr from attr package
> could help me. However attr seems running on Linux (and maybe IRIX) only.
> 
> Therefore I've decided to use libc functions from every system directly. I've
> succesfully ported my code to Linux, IRIX and Darwin (Max OS X). Their AE
> syscalls are very similar. However FreeBSD API is more different. Because I'm
> extending more applications I need to share the code.
> 
> So, my qustions are: should I write my own library or should I extend libattr.
> As I can understand libattr code it's designed to port IRIX application on
> Linux. Am I right? Or are you going support more OS's in libattr? Or exists
> here some similar library providing unified interface fro more systems?

Note: I'm not the maintainer of libattr, so I'm not the one to decide.

I think adding more systems is an excellent idea as it's a bit of a
porting layer already.  Russell will have to add FreeBSD support anyway
once he ports xfsdump to FreeBSD :)