Quoting Roland McGrath <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > This makes it possible to use a GNU/Linux system to not only create but > also populate a Hurdish ext2 filesystem complete with passive translator > settings so that it can boot the Hurd normally. It also makes it possible > to back up and restore a Hurdish ext2 filesystem from a GNU/Linux system, > using any tools that understand the extended attributes. (Off hand the > only such thing I'm aware of is `star', which I have not tried using > myself.) Basically, the ./native-install bootstrapping is right goofy and > one shouldn't have to do things that way. I would much prefer to have a > bootstrap gnu.star in the extended format so it unpacks from GNU/Linux > directly into a complete GNU/Hurd filesystem with /servers and /dev intact.
GNU tar also supports POSIX archives since some months. I wrote a patch for GNU tar to support passive translators (GNU.translator). It should not be too hard to support this on GNU/Linux as well. You can find this patch in the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailinglist archives, but I will send this patch for review to bug-hurd soon. > If people find this useful, then I can try my luck at getting this > incorporated into Linux. Unfortunately, the code in question does not lend > itself to making an isolated module instead of modifying the kernel > directly. I find this very useful. If my tar patch will be applied I can add support so it can create and extract archives with passive translators on GNU/Linux. > If we settle on this allocation of gnu.* xattr names, then another thing I > can do is make the *xattr functions in libc on the Hurd present synthetic > gnu.author and gnu.translator attributes. The benefit of this is that > archivers like star will just work out of the box to save and restore the > author field natively on Hurd filesystems the same way they work on Linux > writing Hurd filesystems. This is probably not so useful for > gnu.translator, since the *xattr libc interfaces don't have the semantics > of O_NOTRANS lookups. However, if e.g. a "notrans" translator were used > for making backups or other archives, then star running on that would > automagically save and restore passive translator settings as you'd want. That would be really nice. Thanks, Marco _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
