[ACL-Devel] tar / cpio / pax: Austrin Group Draft 3 (fwd)

[Robert Watson]

Hope Andreas does not mind -- picked this up off the Linux ACL-devel
mailing list, and it seemed relevant and of interest.

I haven't been following the work at the Austin group closely, so can't
comment much, other than to say that this sounds extremely useful, but
coming up with a set of interoperable attribute names and value formats
sounds like a good idea.  Presumably going for a portable format (perhaps,
say, the POSIX.1e ACL short text form?) might make a lot of sense.

My first choices for extended attribute names in my implementations have
been ``acl_access'', ``acl_default'', ``capabilities'', and so on.  I'd be
tempted to stick ``posix1e.'' in front, but was wondering if the Austin
work had suggested anything about attribute namespaces, APIs for attribute
access, and so on.  Previously, we've discussed mechanisms that support
two namespaces for attributes -- system and user.  In my FreeBSD
implementation, I use a single namespace, but that would be easy to
change, if it was thought necessary.  You could also imagine, as Andreas
suggested on the acl-devel mailing list, a ``system.'' or ``user.''
prefix.

  Robert N M Watson 

robert at fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/
PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37  ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1
TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 11:25:58 +0200
From: Andreas Gruenbacher <a.gruenbacher at bestbits.at>
To: Linux ACL Developers List <acl-devel at bestbits.at>
Subject: [ACL-Devel] tar / cpio / pax: Austrin Group Draft 3

Good news...

The Draft 3 of February 29th 2000 of the Austin Group Commands & Utilities
document includes an extension to the ustar format (which is used by pax, the
successor to both tar and cpio) that allows storage of arbitrary file attributes
(name/value pairs).

While they naturally did not try to standardize on the formats to be used for
ACL, CAP and MAC data, the mechanism is capable of what we need.


Andreas

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 Andreas Gruenbacher, a.gruenbacher at computer.org
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