NFSv4 ACL support in star

[Robert N. M. Watson]

On 10 Nov 2013, at 12:18, Edward Tomasz Napierała <trasz at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

>>>> I am in hope that we could get a final library interface that still stays 
>>>> compatible between FreeBSD and Linux as this was the base for being able to 
>>>> support more platforms with POSIX.1e draft ACLs.
>>> 
>>> I think porting what I did would be a good choice - it's fully backwards
>>> compatible, API-wise, and not actually hacky.
>> 
>> Well, it would be nice to see feedback from Linux people.
> 
> Definitely.

FWIW, and perhaps this is obvious to all, but: FreeBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X share portions of their ACL library APIs, documentation, and implementation (although the degree varies a lot). It would be nice if sensible improvements made to one could be propagated to the others, as this would make life for application writers substantially easier. Some differences are now long-since committed to -- e.g., although Mac OS X picked up the FreeBSD ACL library and API, that was before FreeBSD supported NFSv4 ACLs, and Apple was uninterested in POSIX.1e, so there are necessary differences in the FreeBSD implementation of NFSv4 ACLs. But we should do the best we can to be consistent. One way to do this is to have a common test suite that is aware of intentional differences but tries otherwise to consistently check behaviour that applications like tar, rsync, etc, depend on.

Robert