[Dump-announce] preliminary EA/ACL support in dump/restore

[Stelian P. <st...@po...>]

Hi everybody.

Support of ACLs is a feature requested by many for a long time and I
finally got the time to implement it. Since on Linux ACLs are only
a particular case of EAs (Extended Attributes), I implemented full
EA support, meaning that even security labels set (for example) by
SELinux will be backuped.

You can download a patch (against the current CVS dump) here:
	http://dump.sourceforge.net/dump-ea.patch.bz2

Some notes:
	* the patch is complete, meaning that everything is supposed to 
	  work: dumping, extraction, comparing, in all modes etc.

	* the patch modifies some key areas of restore, so pay
	  attention and verify that you can reread your backups
	  before relying on them.

	* the tape format changed a bit and you will need the patched
	  restore to extract the files.(*)

Please test this and report back if there are any issues. 

I plan to release a new version of dump (0.4b38) in the next few
days, but I will NOT include the EA patch in it, because it really
needs more testing.

But as soon as I get enough positive replies on the EA patch
I will include it in the official mainline.

Thanks,

Stelian.
	  
(*) In fact is a bit more complicated:
- if no EAs are backuped, dump format should remain the same as in
  the old versions, so you can use whatever restore you want.
- if EAs are backuped but never on directory inodes, then a reasonable
  recent version of restore should be happy and just skip over the
  extended attributes data.
- if EAs are backuped for directory inodes, older restores will fail
  to extract with some 'directory corrupted' error.

-- 
Stelian Pop <st...@po...>