[ACL-Devel] archiving acls: tar and cpio

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Sun, 15 Oct 2000, Mats Wichmann wrote:

>> [... storing both user/group names and id's in ACLs in pax extended
headers ...]
> 
> why is anything necessary at all?  historically restores have
> worked whether there's a user database entry or not... after all,
> the "username" is only a convenience in displays from, say, "ls -l".

The default behavior of tar is to use names when restoring a file's owner
and owning group if those users/groups exist, and to fall back to id's if
they don't. The USTAR format contains both user/group names and id's. At
least GNU tar also allows to ignore names and always restore by id. This
behavior is very convenient when moving archives between systems that
don't share the same name/id mapping.

It would be nice if ACLs stored in pax extended headers had the same
robustness. That's why I would prefer to store both names and id's.


Andreas

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Andreas Gruenbacher, a.gruenbacher at computer.org
 Contact information: http://www.bestbits.at/~ag/

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