Subject: RE: Openattr issues/clarifications

From: "Noveck, Dave" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:37:54 -0700

The spec doesn't define which, if any, filehandle types
the server is supposed to support named attributes on.
You have the option to return NOTSUPP if you don't support
named attributes on that particular onject.

My guess is NF4REG and NF4DIR are really a minimal set
for the applications that use this sort of thing.  I 
suppose some people might choose to support named attributes
on NF4CHR, NF4BLK, NF4LNK, NF4SOCK, and NF4FIFO because 
once you have the framework it is easy to do.

The spec doesn't disallow it even on NF4NAMEDATTR and 
NF4ATTRDIR, but I'm kind of doubting that any servers
will actually do that.  (Brent is now coding the support
in Java, just to prove me wrong :-) 

-----Original Message-----
From: Khan, Saadia [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 2:24 PM
To: [email-masked]'; [email-masked]'
Cc: Khan, Saadia
Subject: RE: Openattr issues/clarifications

Are named attributes only supported for files or can directories 
have named attributes too?

thanks,
Saadia

-----Original Message-----
From: Spencer Shepler [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 7:09 AM
To: [email-masked]'
Subject: Re: Openattr issues/clarifications

On Sun, Noveck, Dave wrote:
> 
> I think the simplest way of accommodating multiple styles of
> implementation of this feature is to add a boolean parameter to
> OPENATTR.  If FALSE, OPENATTR would fail if there were no
> named attributes associated with the file.  This would be
> open for interrogate.  If TRUE, it would not fail if there
> were not attributes (or no such directroy although that is
> not something that is explicitly visible in the protocol).
> That would open to modify and it would fail on a read-only
> fs.  Creation per se of the named attribute directory would
> not be called out as a protocol-visible event but it would
> allow an implementation to avoid superfluous creations when
> only interrogations are required. 
> 

This seems like a reasonable protocol modification.

Anyone else have an opinion?

Spencer

---

From: Spencer Shepler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 14:44:52 -0500

> in Java, just to prove me wrong :-) 

Probably not right away but someone will think of some use I am sure.

Spencer