CIFS system attributes support for cp(1), pack(1), unpack(1), compress(1) and uncompress(1) [PSARC/2007/432 FastTrack timeout 08/02/2007]

[Hugh McIntyre]

Don Cragun wrote:
>> This case was approved during PSARC's ARC business meeting today.

I thought the timer was set to August 2nd?  No matter; the case is OK.


Basabi Bhattacharya wrote:
> With the proposed chanages, "cp -p" will copy ACL, extended attributes and
> extended system attributes. If the extended attribute has system attributes
> associated with it, that are also copied.

OK, good.

>> 2)  For compress/uncompress and pack/unpack, why would you not want 
>> these extended attributes to always be preserved without needing to 
>> specify -/?
> 
> The reason was that most users won't have the privileges
> needed to copy all of the extended system attributes and would,
> therefore, fail when working with files that have extended system
> attributes.  To keep existing scripts working, we decided that a new
> option was needed to explicitly ask for extended attributes when the
> caller both needed to preserve them and expected to have the privileges
> needed to do so.
> 
> This was discussed with the CIFS team and we all agreed on the new option.

This seems a shame (and also a conflict with "cp -p" which would 
presumably fail in such scripts).

Any chance that the code could test for the needed privileges and 
attempt to preserve the flags if it can, but only fail if you specify -/ 
and this fails?

>> 3)  Will you be attempting to get similar changes into gzip and bzip2?
> 
> No plan as of now.

OK, perhaps understandable but still unfortunate.  Speaking as the 
person who filed bugs to get ACLs into these commands.

>> 4)  What does Windows or MacOS do when copying files with attributes 
>> without special options?  Should Solaris copy the same behaviour?
> 
> Windows tries to always preserve attributes when a file  is copied.
> Not sure about Mac.

As a FYI, on MacOS:

	- "cp -p" seems to preserve file flags

	- Copying via the GUI finder does not seem to preserve the
	  flags.  There's no "-p" option in this case, I think.

	- "compress" says compress: foo: Operation not permitted".
	  There's no option to alter this, which is maybe a symptom
	  of Apple's general neglect of command line tools.

Hugh.