From:	 Andreas Gruenbacher <ag@bestbits.at>
To:	 acl-devel@bestbits.at
Subject: [Acl-Devel] Version 0.7.22 released
Date:	 Mon, 29 Oct 2001 05:16:22 +0100 (CET)

Hello,

Version 0.7.22 finally is ready. This will be the last version before
moving to a common system call interface (XFS and ext2/ext3, for a start).  
The most notable changes are:

  - 2.4 patches are against Alan Cox kernels
  - Support for the ext3 filesystem
  - Quota handling should now be "sane"
  - The ACL library now is a shared library
  - Massive clean-up of the kernel patches
  - The system call numbers on i386 have changed again (!)

Who should upgrade

   The patches now give you ext3 support, if you want that. If you are
using Extended Attributes or Access Control Lists together with quotas it
is also recommended to upgrade. Otherwise, the current patches are the
last version before moving to a common system call interface, so you might
want to wait until that happens.

How to upgrade

   The step-by-step guide at <http://acl.bestbits.at/steps.html> contains
instructions.

Ext3 support

   I owe very many thanks to Eric Jarman <ejarman@acm.org> for doing the
initial port to ext3, and for very careful debugging. Without his help the
ext3 filesystem still wouldn't be supported for some time!
   Ext3 is also the reason for using Alan Cox kernels (the stock Linus
kernels don't include ext3 so far, but Linus has announced it will be
included soon).

Kernel patches

   The last released version also included a hack that fixed a quota bug
(initially charging the wrong user upon file creation). The new version
does this in a clean way.
   All Extended Attribute and Access Control List code has been moved from
the VFS into the file systems, which allowed further simplifications.

EA and ACL utilities

   Both packages now use GNU autoconf. The parameters for configuring have
changed to be similar to many other packages.
   The ACL library now is a shared library (libacl.so.0), so hopefully it
won't be necessary to rebuild all tools that use it whenever the system
call interface changes. You will have to rebuild the fileutils one more
time to make them use the shared library, though.

Common system call interface

   We have made good progress on negotiating a common system call
interface for at least XFS and ext2/ext3 extended attribute support. The
current proposal can be found at <http://oss.sgi.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/
linux-2.4-xfs/cmd/attr2/man/man2/extattr.2>. After clarifying the few
remaining issues we will move to this new interface, and negotiate a
common interface for access control lists.
   The common interface will break compatibility at the system call level.
I will also introduce a small change at the filesystem level at that time,
so filessystem compatibility will break at the same time. There will be an
upgrade path without losing anything, of course.


I guess that's it for now.

Regards,
Andreas.

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