[Box Backup] Extended attributes on FreeBSD

[James O'Gorman]

Hi all,

Just catching up about - haven't been around much recently!

On 2/3/09 22:25, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi Victor,
>
> On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, Victor Meirans wrote:
>
>> I'm doing a fresh install on FreeBSD 7.1, latest boxbackup code from
>> trunk (2448). The question is: how to enable extended attributes support
>> during configure
>
> You will need a sys/xattr.h file, probably in /usr/include or
> /usr/local/include. I'd be quite surprised if FreeBSD didn't include that
> by default, as I gather it has better support for extended attributes than
> Linux does. In any case, if configure detects the [l]listxattr and
> [l]getxattr functions, it will use them, even if they are not defined in
> sys/xattr.h and configure reports "Extended attributes: no".

FreeBSD's extended attributes are different from Linux or OS X. I think 
they were originally designed to be fully POSIX, but those used by ext3 
and hfs+ aren't (iirc).

There's been some talk on the FreeBSD developer lists recently about 
changing this, to be more in line with "what everyone else is doing."

For now, extended attributes are not supported under FreeBSD until 
someone can either provide patches to make it work or the FreeBSD 
project brings their xattrs in line.

James

P.S. You might notice a few "old" mails suddenly start appearing on the 
list - I hadn't had time to check the moderation queue for some time. 
Sorry about this.