Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs

From	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs
Date	2017-07-08 21:50 +0200
Message-ID	<u13TP-6gZ-3@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
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On Thu, Jul 6, 2017 at 11:27 AM, Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca> wrote:
>
> IMHO, xattrs are a fairly reasonable interface for accessing filesystem-specific
> attributes of a file that do not have generic equivalents on other filesystems.
> I can't see there being much value to having AFS-specific syscalls, and xattrs
> also are more easily accessed by generic userspace tools than ioctl() calls.

Yeah, I think attributes are likely much better than some random crazy
ioctl interface. They can be listed with generic tools, and have
various scripting interfaces in ways that ioctl's do not sanely have.

And people tend to be encouraged to use good descriptive interfaces
due to attributes having *names* instead of numbers.

That said, if these things have some actual generic cross-filesystem
meaning, then some ad-hoc fs attribute might be debatable. It might
still be an attribute, but perhaps better in an actual generic
namespace.

I haven't looked at these particular attibutes yet, though.

                 Linus

Thread

[PATCH 0/2] AFS: Changes David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> - 2017-07-06 17:00 +0200
  [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> - 2017-07-06 17:00 +0200
    Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> - 2017-07-06 17:30 +0200
      Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> - 2017-07-06 18:20 +0200
        Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca> - 2017-07-06 20:30 +0200
          Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2017-07-08 21:50 +0200
            Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> - 2017-07-09 03:10 +0200
              Re: [PATCH 2/2] afs: Add metadata xattrs Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@auristor.com> - 2017-07-09 04:50 +0200

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