Hello!

This is a forwarding of a feature request that was initially filed at:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=591763


From: Witold Baryluk <baryluk@smp.if.uj.edu.pl>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>
Subject: bsdtar: It should be possible to create archive without extended attributes,  ACLs, selinux labels, ...
Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:01:53 +0200


Package: bsdtar
Version: 2.8.4-1
Severity: normal

Currently bsdtar allways create archives which includes all information about
file,
including extended attributes.

It is possible to ignore this information on extraction.

But there should be possible to ignore this information also on cration,
for example when we are creating archive not for archiving purpose,
but for somebody else (for example distributing our source codes).
Extended attributes could contain some sensitive private data,
which can be even created automatically (consider beagle, or backup
metadata, or metadata used by version control system, ecryptfs
keys, etc).

Simples way is to have new option, --disable-xattr which will just skip
xattr reading (and so will not write any to archive).

In future, it could be extended to only include xattrs which match/not-match
a given regexp. It could be also used then so tar will also use xattr
to retrive/store which file to archive or was archived (and when, and into what
file). For example
according to http://freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes:

       user.xdg.robots.backup: On a file: "true" to index, "false" to not
backup.
       On a directory: "true" to traverse the into the directory for backup,
       "false" for not traversing into it.'''

But disableing on demand for now would be most usefull.