On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:16:00AM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >On Jan 16 10:08, Pavel Fedin wrote: >> Hello! >> >> > > What do you think about adding other possible namespaces (system, >> > > security, and... don't remember the 3rd one) ? So that when >> > > manipulating UNIX archives etc these attributes could be kept along >> > > with files ? At least we have one use case now. >> > >> > That doesn't make sense. Extended attributes as implemented by Windows >> > are user attributes, not system attributes. The non-user attributes on >> > Linux have a very special meaning to the kernel and/or are restricted >> > to privileged users only. Their functionality is already provided by >> > other OS functions (as for system.posix_acl_access) or not at all (as >> > for security.selinux). >> >> I know they have special meaning. At the other hand, if we allow >> them, we will allow to store them on a filesystem. Wouldn't it be >> nice ? This is useful at least for SquashFS image preparation. >> I guess for similar reasons we have support e. g. for device nodes >> (/dev) with their major/minor numbers. They are also ignored by >> Cygwin, and just stored on the filesystem (or do i miss something ?). > >Yes, the history. The device nodes were a start to implement actual >loadable device handler code (application level, not actual device >drivers), but for some reason it was never fully implemented.
If you're talking about the ability to create a device file anywhere that was something that I did. It wasn't to implement loadable device handlers but just so that we could eventually have a real /dev populated with device files. However, we have since gone the route of creating a pseudo-filesystem /dev so that's no longer necessary. I also did this to allow the creation of fifos anywhere so that's still a valid use case. And, actually, creating a device node anywhere is certainly something that you need to be able to do if you want to claim Linux-like functionality. Device nodes are not (or are not supposed to be) "ignored by Cygwin". cgf -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
