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

[Alan Schmitt]

On 24 juin 06, at 15:49, Trevor Jim wrote:

> One important detail not mentioned so far: cross-platform
> support.  How do you sync a file with extended attributes
> on Mac to Windows or Linux?  For forks, type, creator,
> there is an existing standard way of doing this that we
> have coopted.  I don't know whether that supports all the
> attributes you want.  (We are using Apple Double files.)

The same happens with extended attributes for "cp": for a file  
"file", they get stored in "._file".

> Here is an article about metadata support for backup tools
> on OS X, it has some useful information:
>
>    http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup- 
> and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/

I've read this some time ago (and found it very interesting). I hope  
future versions of OS X will clean up a bit the mess that is metadata  
today.

> Regarding the hooks into the OS functions to read attributes,
> etc., there are two difficulties.  First, Apple has not necessarily
> done a good job documenting this stuff, in my experience.
> Second, these functions might exists in 10.4 but not in 10.3,
> so, there are issues similar to what happens for cross-platform
> support.

Yes, so synchronizing them should depend on a flag.

> My experience adding support for resource forks, etc., is that
> this is something that needs a lot of care.

I agree, this is why I'm not sure of the way to go. But I find  
metadata more and more important, and I would really like to have a  
way to synchronize it.

Alan

-- 
Alan Schmitt <http://alan.petitepomme.net/>

The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool  
happen.
.O.
..O
OOO


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