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

[Marius Bendiksen]

> 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. 

Personally, I would prefer to check a prefix, segmenting the namespace by
a compulsory "user." / "system." / "foo." etc. set. Note that this does
not really incur any extra overhead on a modern computer, due to cache
issues. You would want to make the "user." namespace implicit for changes
specified by the user, I guess.

> 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

Certainly. This needs to be entirely uniform across platforms if we are to
have any chance of reaping the potential benefit of extended attributes.

> two namespaces also makes some amount of sense, but a unified namespace
> leads to a unified namespace solution, whereas two namespaces would

I maintain distinct namespaces internally, but it would be 5 minutes of
work, tops, to change what is presented to the user.

> require applications to distinguish between them (such as backup tools)
> themselves, offloading the problem to be solved in numerous different ways
> by different authors.

Indeed. We would do well to adopt a segmented namespace of this sort, thus
avoiding all the hair of modifying applications that support EAs too much.

Marius

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