Re: [PATCH] get/set FAT filesystem attribute bits

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Nicholas Miell wrote:
> 
> Yeah, I contemplated adding system.fattattrs, system.ntfsattrs, and
> system.linuxattrs (for the ext2 attrs that have popped up in several
> other filesystems) a while ago, but xattrs seem to be the red-headed
> left-handed stepchild of the Linux VFS and I lost interest in the
> project.
> 
> Nice to see someone else interested in it, though.
 >

I'm honestly not sure that using an ASCII string in an xattr is the sane 
way of doing this.  Even a binary byte in an xattr would make more sense 
in some ways.

I think the xattr mechanism is ignored largely because it's painfully 
complex.

A plus with using xattr is that in theory (but of course not in 
practice!) it would let one store a copy of a DOS filesystem on an ext3 
(or xfs, or...) filesystem and have it restored, all using standard (but 
by necessity, xattr-aware) tools.  However, the splitting of xattr into 
namespaces may very well make that impossible, since what's a "system" 
attribute to one filesystem is a "user" attribute to another.  Classic 
design flaw, by the way.

Anyway, I'm going to send out something to the various maintainers of 
DOS-based filesystems (FAT, CIFS, NTFS) and see what they think.

	-hpa