Subject: Re: Feedback needed on proposed cygwin feature
From: [email-masked] (Jason Zions)

1 Dec 1997 19:51:24 -0800
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It strikes me that the best place for per-binary attributed like this
would be in the binary itself. I don't know how closely cygwin's exec()
looks at the program being exec'd; if it looks at the program header,
there should be a way to squirrel the attributes away there someplace.

Many "real Unix" systems do just this sort of thing; e.g. chatr in
HP-UX, which is used to alter a.out attributes.

Pro: 
  a) attributes are *really* a part of the binary; symlinks and
hardlinks all pointing to the same bits on the disk will behave the
same, while name-based approaches may be inconsistent

  b) makes it easier for attributes to work over network mounts (when
filesystems can be mounted in different places)

Con:
  a) extracting the attributes from the binary may be slower

  b) may be hard to find a "safe place" to stash the bits

Jason
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