Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Ruminations on Arch Desiderata

[Paul Snively]

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Hi Damien!

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 04:55  AM, Damien Elmes wrote:

> I don't know much at all about development on Apple machines, but was
> under the impression that resource forks are deprecated [1], on the
> grounds that they make it difficult to interoperate with other
> platforms.
Deprecated or not, they exist and, given that the filesystem continues  
to be HFS+ and software that uses resources continues to exist, be  
built from source, and be written, they need to be accounted for.  
Besides that, there's still the issue of HFS[+] metadata to consider,  
which is also treated by AppleSingle.

> Does applesingle attempt to solve the problem of the extra metadata
> you mention as well?

Got ahead of myself, apparently. :-)

>  It just seems like a nasty thing for Arch to have
> to deal with. Would the ability to store arbitrary metadata at the
> Arch level solve the problem in a more general way?
It would solve the metadata problem, but not the resource fork problem,  
I'm guessing. Unless you wanted to call resource forks "arbitrary  
metadata."

But I guess I'm not clear as to why this is a nasty thing for Arch to  
have to deal with. It's no nastier than MacCVSPRO or CVL having to deal  
with it. AppleSingle exists precisely so that you can plug it in and  
play nicely with plain ol' POSIX filesystems. Obviously, it would be  
conditionally compiled just for the Mac and only called in cases where  
there was a resource fork and/or non-default metadata. I'm a little  
surprised that this point is the one that's proving difficult, and the  
(in my mind, anyway) much trickier issue of DNS-SD support isn't even  
being commented on. But one thing at a time, I agree. :-)

> [1]
> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/ 
> SystemOverview/FileSystem/chapter_9_section_5.html
I should perhaps mention that I've been programming Macintoshes since  
1985 and put in a 2.5-year stint at Apple. You can safely assume that  
I'm familiar with Apple's developer docs.

> Cheers,
> --
> Damien Elmes

Best regards,
Paul


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