[Unison-hackers] Unison and extended attributes (xattr) on Tiger?

[Benjamin Pierce]

>> 	I am pretty sure unison cannot synchronize extended attributes yet.
>> rsync, mv, cp, etc. can handle extended attributes because Apple
>> modified them in Tiger. I started some very preliminary work on an  
>> OCaml
>> interface to the "C" extended attribute functions, but I really  
>> haven't
>> had much time to focus on this project.  If you want to help out,  
>> let me
>> know.
>
> Well, this is something I'd really like Unison to support. My main  
> worry is not getting the attributes or reconciling changes to them,  
> it's exposing them in the UI.

This is something we've dealt with already for some somewhat similar  
cases -- e.g., the TYPE and CREATOR fields on OSX, which I believe  
are handled fairly cleanly, and resource forks, which we didn't  
succeed in handling at especially cleanly (the possible presence of  
resource forks pollutes a lot of code in a lot of modules).  So  
there's a good and a bad precedent.  :-)

For the UI, I guess the main issue is how big the information is --  
can it just go in the same place as the permission bits, or does it  
need to be summarized in some way?

     - Benjamin