Re: [PATCH] POSIX ACL support

[Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com>]

Hi everyone,

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> This is really a general comment, not an issue with your patch in
>> particular, so don't let it distract. I just wonder if it is possible to
>> find a different way to pass this information around, so that we don't
>> need to have an ever increasing list of function arguments and return
>> values (preserve-this, preserve-that, preserve-the-other, etc...).
>> I don't have a good suggestion for how to do that.
>> (I have a vague memory this was mentioned when SELinux was added.)

> Yes, that's a problem.  We should consolidate `modes', `context', and
> `acl' into a `metadata' argument.

Ok, in files.el I can refactor the code to pass all the metadata in one go
and avoid the extra ACL argument here and there, no problem.

However, I think Glenn was also referring to the additional argument to
`copy-file', which doesn't preserve the modes. But maybe we can change the
existing `preserve-selinux-context' argument into a more general
`preserve-platform-attributes' argument and do both ACL and SELinux? Any
caller that wants to preserve the SELinux context probably wants to
preserve the ACL entries as well, anyway.

Ideally we'd get rid of `file-modes', `file-selinux-context' and
`file-posix-acl' and just add the info to `file-attributes', which already
returns a list of 12 different attributes. Then `set-file-attributes'
would be created to set all those different attributes in one go. But that
would be a lot of work...

Thanks!