Question about extended attributes...

["Linda A. Walsh" <xfs@xxxxxxxxx>]

my man page says extended xfs attributes can have 256-byte names
with up to 64K of data.

Is there a limit on the number of extended attributes max data size or 
name size?

I.e. could I have 1000 attributes with 64K of data each?

Is there a strong reason why the file and data sizes were limited to 
256/64K?
Would they be hard to 'generalize' to max-path-segment-len/max-filelen?

Only reason I wonder is wondering what file systems besides apple's 
"HPFS"(?) and
MS's NTFS, that allow alternate data-streams of arbitrary length.  I'm 
not sure about
the maximums on HPFS and NTFS, but I haven't _read_ of any notable 
limits (I'm sure
there are some, but it _seems_ you can store alternate file versions in 
different data-streams
on NTFS, for example...  I.e. could use it as a revision system, 
theoretically -- to save
older versions of the file with the right software -- but with XFS, it 
wouldn't be so
general case with a 64K data limit -- wouldn't be a show-stopper if one 
could 'link'
multiple data-segments, but am just curious about the limitations (not 
that I'm planning
on implementing a version control system using data-forks...it was just 
an example! :-)).

linda