Privilege level for $ extended attributes? Re: Extended attribute interfaces

[Robert Watson]

Andreas,

Boris and others have raised with me that they are concerned about the
choice of the symbol '$' as the prefix for system attributes.  In
particular, because that symbol is widely used as a special character in
shell scripts and scripting languages.  While they didn't have any
particular favored recommendations as to an alternative, I can sympathize
with the concern.  Is this something you feel should not be changed, or
would you be willing to discuss alternatives?

One possibility in my mind as been to assume a name-space segmented by the
"." or "/" characters, and prefix "system." or ".system." in front of the
attribute name.  Right now, I'm using '$posix1e.cap' for POSIX.1e
capability backing store, which would result in 'system.posix1e.cap' as
the new attribute name, which makes a fair amount of sense.  It doesn't
have the simplicity of allowing the check of a single character, however. 
In any case, as nothing is set in stone at this point, it's probably a
good time to discuss the issue.  The SGI solution of simply maintaining
two namespaces also makes some amount of sense, but a unified namespace
leads to a unified namespace solution, whereas two namespaces would
require applications to distinguish between them (such as backup tools)
themselves, offloading the problem to be solved in numerous different ways
by different authors.

  Robert N M Watson 

robert at fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/
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