[redhat-lspp] Package list

[Russell Coker]

On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 18:12 -0400, James Morris wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
> 
> > > tar now include the extended attributes and the label?
> > >
> > tar does not and will not support xtended attributes.
> 
> Why won't tar support xattrs?

In the previous version of SE Linux (before XATTR) there was a patched
tar.  However it apparently used the wrong file format and would not be
accepted.  Additionally the code in GNU tar is difficult to extend, so
it's generally easier to use star when we want to preserve xattrs.

I'm not aware of it being impossible to add support for xattrs to GNU
tar, just unreasonably difficult.

I don't think that this is a major problem.  The most common use of tar
is for files that all have the same security context (EG archives of
source code).  Changing backup scripts which call tar to call star
instead shouldn't be difficult.