Support of named attributes in jdk7

[Jean-Pierre André]

Hi,

I am working with the ntfs-3g project, aiming at providing NTFS
storage for multiple OS (Linux, MacOSX, Solaris, etc.), and I am
currently fulfilling the development of extended attributes.

A specific concern for us, as pluggable storage devices tend now to be
formatted as NTFS off the box, is that the files created on a platform
can be directly used when the plugged into another platform, even
of a different type.

As jdk7 is apparently extending the io class to support named
attributes, we would like our implementation to be such that a Java
application running on any platform and using NTFS could process
the data written by the same application on another platform.

The main problem is to comply with the rules for naming the attributes
on each platform, and we think these naming rules should be hidden
from the Java programmer. On Linux specifically, the prefix "user."
should not be apparent.

As a consequence, we (at ntfs-3g) have to make adaptations so that
the extended attributes are stored the same way on NTFS from either
Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X. Currently we map the extended
attributes to alternative data streams.

Attached is a chart trying to explain this, and we would like to know
whether jdk7 supports a similar view.

Home page of the ntfs-3g project : http://www.ntfs-3g.org
Implementation of extended attributes :
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/b.andre/extend-attr.html

Regards

Jean-Pierre

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