Re: Portability of libattr

[Russell Cattelan <cattelan@thebarn.com>]

Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> 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 :)
>
>   
nod.

I have not looked closely at the FreeBSD EA stuff so I don't know how 
different things
are. I can't imagine they are that far off?

I thought the libattr code does compile on IRIX. There was an effort at 
one point to only
have one usespace code base that worked on both linux and irix.

I would be really cool if we got FreeBSD support into libattr.

-Russell