Extended attributes [LWN.net]

Extended attributes

Posted Apr 21, 2005 7:49 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
In reply to: Extended attributes by giraffedata
Parent article: FUSE hits a snag

It seems to me that the special semantics are no more or less than
a user could trick his/her processes to see with other, purely
userspace tools using LD_PRELOAD, such as fakeroot. The
point of FUSE is merely to facilitate the task.

In other words, it's the users' business what semantics they
present to themselves, and not a kernel hacker's problem.

Looking at the application with full generality, you want to
have the flexibility to map users and permissions about in any
way you wish, just as you might remap uids and usernames over
NFS or SMB, or 'squish' root privileges to nothing. And in this
case, the power do do that remapping belongs to the person
running 'mount'.

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User-controlled file permission semantics with FUSE

Posted Apr 21, 2005 15:39 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It seems to me that the special semantics are no more or less than a user could trick his/her processes to see with other, purely userspace tools using LD_PRELOAD

I think the point is just that users presumably would like in some cases both to have access to files with FUSE and have normal semantics. FUSE should provide users that capability if possible.

Also, in the proposal, mounting a filesystem affects other processes -- all those owned by the same user see the mounted files with unconventional permission semantics.