Re: Support for extended attributes

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

> As I am currently planning the development of a project that requires the use of extended attributes (i.e. non-standard, user-defined filesystem attributes), I would like to know if there is Lua support for extended attributes. If so, which module should I use?
> I am new to Lua, and I know that it is a quite easy language. But this matter of extended attributes, which is vital to my project, is a major stumbling block for a newbie like me. I am confident that, if I solve this problem, the rest of my project will be easy to carry out. Please help me.
> By the way, I am planning to use the BFS filesystem (used by the Haiku OS and by old BeOS), because its support of extended attributes is absolutely the best among all the filesystems.

I've a soft spot for BeOS, I ran it for a while back in the day, tons
of fun even though I didn't have a BeBox, I even read "Practical File
System Design with the Be File System".

lua is a nice language, but one of its strengths is that it doesn't
come burdened with libraries, this is also a weakness, there isn't
very much you can do with lua unless you find modules you need, or
more commonly, bind it to the C or C++ APIs you want to use.

Anyhow, if your project is non-trivial, extending Lua to support
extended attributes will be the easiest part.

What are the C APIs used in BeOS to manipulate extended attributes? It
should be quite easy to bind them into lua, making them available to
your project.

Ext2fs also seems to support extended attributes, but I doubt it does
in anything close to the way thae BeFS does - reiserfs is the only
linux FS I'm aware of that seemed to have similar goals to BeFS. Are
you sure linux' extended attributes do what you need? What is it you
need, anyway?

Without some idea of what attributes you want control of, what the
system calls are that you need to use, and some idea of what you are
trying to use Lua for, its hard to be more helpful.

Cheers,
Sam