Re: file attributes

Robert Mayer - Student wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> yesterday I thought of something:
> OS/2 has these nice "Extended Attributes", where one can attach a
> string=value pair to a file. Wouldn't it be nice to have such a thing
> under VSTa too?
> The first thing that came to my mind was to extend VSTa's rstat/wstat
> mechanism so that the valid stat-fields are not limited to these
> defined at server-compile-time, and one could add new ones by simply
> wstat()ing them.
> On the other hand, one could also extend the message protocol by e.g.
> FS_GETATTR/FS_SETATTR, and handle attributes and stat-fields
> seperately.
> Thoughts anyone?

I discussed something similar with Andy a while back, but decided in the end
that extending the message format wasn't the best way of doing this sort of
thing.

The problem I hit when I thought up my extension was that the decision about
whether a field was accessed via one mechanism or the other became too
abitrary. As an example an extended attribute on say an HPFS filesystem
might be the file owner, but on a Linux ext2fs it's there as a standard
attribute. It wouldn't seem to make much sense (and it would certainly
confuse ls) to have potentially two ways to get the same information.

I like the idea of allowing dynamic additions to the stat fields though :-)

                Regards,
                Dave
Received on Tue Sep 6 03:44:57 1994