Re: Re-2: mv do not preserves default acls

[Jim Meyering]

Hi Andreas!

Andreas Gruenbacher <address@hidden> wrote:
...
> There are patches for coreutils-5.90 now -- I just updated the diffs. I'll
> happily send them if anyone is interested.

Great!  I'm interested.

> Jim, you wrote:
>> We haven't integrated support for ACLs, yet.
>> There are patches being used by several distributions.
>> If there's interest, I'll begin distributing one of those
>> patch sets -- and keeping it in sync -- so people don't have
>> to struggle through merges all the time.
>
> I would much more appreciate if you could finally integrate the patches, or if
> we could work out something that you consider mergeable by your standards.

I've never seen patches that add tests.
Adding tests is an important prerequisite for such a significant
change.  For example, I recall at least one ACL-related bug being
reported, then fixed in the last couple of years.  It'd be nice to
have a test case to exercise the changed behavior in each such case.

Of course, such tests would have to depend on finding a writable
directory in an ACL- or XATTR-enabled partition as well as a few
related tools.  You could require that each such directory be
specified via an environment variable.  If it's not set, or not
the right type, or required tools are missing, then just skip the test.
You can even add root-only tests, if necessary.

...
> That's what the patches floating around implement for a limited set of UNIX
> variants. IMHO that's a reasonable starting point, and support for more
> UNIXes can be added in a matter of hours. Coreutils include a number of
> optimizations that make no sense in the presence of ACLs, so maybe that's why
> there is so much resistance.

I'm not at all worried about the removed optimizations.
The utility of the added feature far outweighs any performance
degradation.  Besides, I suspect that any performance decrease will
be negligible.