cannot set attributes on symlink

[Tim Cuthbertson]

xattr seems to read attributes from symlinks, but always set them on the underlying file. Here's an example by way of a shell session:

$ cd /tmp
$ touch target
$ ln -s target source

$ python -i
>>> import xattr
>>> symlink = xattr.xattr('source', options=xattr.XATTR_NOFOLLOW)
>>> underlying_file = xattr.xattr('target')
>>> symlink['user.test_xattr'] = '1'

# now we should have an attribute on the symlink itself, and nothing on the underlying file. But the opposite is true:

>>> symlink['user.test_xattr']
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KeyError Traceback (most recent call last)

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xattr/__init__.pyc in __getitem__(self, item)
    131 return self.get(item)
    132 except IOError:
--> 133 raise KeyError(item)
    134
    135 def iterkeys(self):

KeyError: 'user.test_xattr'

>>> underlying_file['user.test_xattr']
'1'

[Tim Cuthbertson (gfxmonk)]

I've fixed the issue in a guthub fork, below:

https://github.com/xattr/xattr/pull/4

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

This should be fixed in xattr, please reopen if not.