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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Snively <address@hidden> writes:

    Paul> "AppleSingle," is a popular standard in the real world,
    Paul> being used, for example, by netatalk to store Macintosh
    Paul> files on non-Macintosh filesystems, and by Mac-oriented
    Paul> version control clients like MacCVSPro and CVL.

Is that the one with all the colons?  IIRC it was basically Unix file
system safe if you just left it alone.  Is there a reason why you need
to be able to read this other than from a Mac?  I mean, ISTR it was
transparent to Mac users, so it should be transparent to tla, too, if
you run tla from a Mac running AppleTalk or whatever.

    Paul> So my first question is: does someone relatively familiar
    Paul> with the tla implementation have any suggestions as to where
    Paul> good integration points for AppleSingle support might be? 
    Paul> Bottlenecks that create, open, read, write, close files?

You don't want to do this if you can possibly avoid it.  Let Apple do
it for you.  They've been dealing with the corner cases for more than
a decade, maybe two, and the system calls are the right interface to
insinuate in any case.  (The idea is that either the string really is
a file system object's name, or what are you doing handing it to the
system call in the first place?  And the server knows it's an
AppleTalk server!  But how does tla know if it's a native object or an
AppleTalk server resource?)  If you try to emulate it within tla for
non-Apple machines accessing AppleTalk, you probably aren't going to
get it right.  If you absolutely must, then do it as close to the file
system interface as you can.


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