RFC: evolution of file management

[Keith Matthews]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003 23:48:53 +0200
Ferenc Wagner <wferi at afavant.elte.hu> wrote:

> Do we need attributes like hidden, system, etc?
>                                                 Feri.
> 

More to the point we need attributes to allow support of NT ACLs.  I've
been looking at the problem and progressing only very slowly, some of
the problems are technical, others are nothing to do with Wine at all.

At the level we are dealing with here the essential problems (for those
who have not examined the issues) are :-

	Not all supported O/S s offer ACLs.

	Those that do support POSIX ACLs which do not map exactly to NT ACLs

	Even in Systems which do support POSIX ACLs there is no guarantee that
	all disc filesystems at any one host will offer it, Of the Linux
	filesystem types only XFS supports ACLs out of the box. Work is in
	progress for ReiserFS and due to start for JFS. There is a patch for
	ext2/3. One map currently favoured is to use ext2/3/Reiser for the root
	filesystem and XFS for (some of) the rest).

All of the systems that do support ACLs use Extended Attributes to store
them. I am still looking at limitations on number of EAs, but there is a
possibility that an extreme case on NT may not be supported on Linux.

Since I've not yet got round to looking at TrustedBSD there's
potentially another can of worms there.

My conclusion is that we do (regrettably) need a VFS layer to harmonise
handling of all this lot and respond correctly when wine-ver is 9X.