Re: [PATCH] Revised extended attributes interface

Nathan Scott
2001-12-08T05:00:44Z

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 08:20:36PM +0000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> Hi,
>

hi Stephen,

> This is looking OK as far as EAs go. However, there is still no
> mention of ACLs specifically, except an oblique reference to
> "system.posix_acl_access".

Yup - there's little mention of ACLs because they are only an
optional, higher-level consumer of the API, & so didn't seem
appropriate to document here.

We have implemented POSIX ACLs above this interface - there
is source to new versions of Andreas' user tools here:
http://oss.sgi.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/linux-2.4-xfs/cmd/acl2
These have been tested with XFS and seem to work fine, so we
are ready to transition over from our old implementation to
this new one.

In a way there's consensus wrt how to do POSIX ACLs on Linux
now, as both the ext2/ext3 and XFS ACL projects will be using
the same tools, libraries, etc. In terms of other ACL types,
I don't know of anyone actively working on any.

The existence of a POSIX ACL implementation using attributes
system.posix_acl_access and system.posix_acl_default doesn't
preclude other types of ACLs from being implemented (obviously
using different attributes) as well of course, if someone had
an itch to scratch.

cheers.

--
Nathan