Re: [PATCH] POSIX ACL support

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

> However, I think Glenn was also referring to the additional argument to
> `copy-file', which doesn't preserve the modes.

Yes, this also needs to be handled in a similar way (tho I'm not sure
what you mean by "which doesn't preserve the modes" since the docstring
says "This function always sets the file modes of the output file to match
the input file.").

> 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.

Actually, I'd go even further and merge PRESERVE-UID-GID
PRESERVE-SELINUX-CONTEXT into a single argument.

> 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...

I'm not sure I'm ready to add the info to file-attributes.
But we could start by providing a new file-extended-attributes which
returns a self-descriptive list of attributes, and then
set-file-extended-attributes which takes that list and applies it.


        Stefan