is support planned for user.* xattrs?

[J. Bruce Fields]

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 06:22:57PM -1000, Joshua Hoblitt wrote:
> My real interest in xattrs is for some in house software that is sort of
> like perverted user space file system.  It basically represents a
> collection of mounted volumes on the system as a flat namespace and
> allows many identical copies of files to be stored on different volumes
> (optionally with specified volumed names to allow for data locality
> optimizations).  It's functional like a cluster file system it's just a
> simple library that provides analogs to open()/close()/etc.  I keep
> saying I'll write a fuse interface for it someday.  The difference vs. a
> typical cluster filesystem (at least 2 years ago when we started work on
> this thing) is the desire to be able to say "I want 5 copies of this
> important data to be stored on different nodes in my cluster".
> 
> Anyways, to cut a long story short because the file names end up be
> mangled and I'd like to stick xattrs on them with the original filename
> in case of catastrophic metadata failure (e.g., the master/slave sql
> database go boom and the last backup was too far out of date) or
> corruption.  I'll probably end up just writing an additional "metadata"
> file that contains this information anyways.

OK!  Well, if you've got spare time and are looking for an excuse to
become an expert linux vfs hacker, then this could be a fun project.
Otherwise it's a project that's just waiting for someone else to come
along and pick it up.

--b.