RFC: Extended Attribute Support for tar

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2006, Tim Kientzle wrote:

>  By default, "system" and "root" namespaces are not archived.  (Rationale: 
> These are often not accessible to regular users.  They are often used for 
> ACLs and other properties that should be archived using other mechanisms.)
>
> Comparison with other approaches:  Joerg Shilling's "star" implementation is 
> the only "tar" program that I know of that attempts to archive extended 
> attributes. It uses an approach similar to the above, but it does not encode 
> the attribute name (hence cannot handle attributes with '=' or non-ASCII 
> bytes in the name) and stores the attribute value as raw binary (which 
> contradicts the pax specification which requires UTF8).
>
> Any comments or feedback are greatly appreciated.

This all sounds pretty reasonable to me, especially the decision regarding 
system attributes.  Since you say "by default", I assume you intend to provide 
a way to optionally backup and restore attributes in other name spaces if 
requested?

Robert N M Watson