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I've spent a few hours looking at xattr and the Linux/OS X (10.4+) implementations. Bob Ippolito's xattr module implements the OS X xattr interface on Linux, Solaris (9+) and FreeBSD. Linux and OS X are pretty close; FreeBSD and Solaris are substantially different from either and the Solaris implementation is somewhat incomplete/broken.
The OS X differences from Linux are:
• Instead of l* functions, the XATTR_NOFOLLOW option
• XATTR_NOSECURITY and XATTR_NODEFAULT are in the headers but essentially unavailable as the kernel code always returns EINVAL for them.
• XATTR_SHOWCOMPRESSION to expose the HFS compression stuff, which I can't imagine many people needing
• XATTR_MAXNAMELEN (but no equivalent to XATTR_SIZE_MAX). Linux has a corresponding XATTR_NAME_MAX, which we should probably expose too.
• XATTR_FINDERINFO_NAME and XATTR_RESOURCEFORK_NAME for some standard attribute names. I would imagine these are worth exposing.
I don't see any problems supporting the currently exposed Linux API on OS X (I could probably find a usable value for XATTR_SIZE_MAX), but it's unclear if that is the right way to go forward.
Suggestions?