[arch-general] file system capabilities

[Xavier]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org> wrote:
>
> Just in case someone knows, does star preserve capabilities, I'm under
> the impression it does a better job on ACLs and other file system
> flags than tar?
>

After a bit of digging :

- Fedora and Redhat have a patched gnu tar with xattr support (which
should be similar to star according to [1])

- bsdtar has official xattr support. This works fine, except for the
special security.capability attribute, because bsdtar sets the
extended attributes before writing the file (because of the
information from [1]) and not after. And afaik security.capability is
the only one which get lost after file modification (for security
purpose). Anyway I contacted libarchive author about this problem so
it should be fixed in the next (major?) release.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-tar@gnu.org/msg02053.html