backups

[Jamie Zawinski]

Colin Walters wrote:
> 
> As far as I can tell, the *only* software we ship that even supports
> xattrs at all is "star".  However star has the enormous drawback ...

Wouldn't it be more sensible to extend "tar" to support xattrs?

tar file headers are 512 bytes long; "traditional" tar used only 256
of those bytes, and GNU tar added additional fields out to 345 bytes.
That leaves 167 bytes left over, and stuffing extra data in there 
would be backward compatible (both older tar implementations would
simply ignore it.)

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz at jwz.org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz at dnalounge.com       http://www.dnalounge.com/