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Re: Dot files

On Jun 20, 2006, at 00:30 AM, Ruth Bygrave wrote:

Losing data that should be contained in a file because it shows up separately just sounds wrong. I have no idea why the original Mac OS had this dependence on forks, but I haven't heard it's any particular benefit to the users. If what I see is the equivalent of view data, I'll happily ignore it, but if it's part of the file's content it should be _in_ the file. (Thanks very much to all of you who pointed out how to avoid the dot files: if it's Finder stuff to do with displaying files I don't need it at all for the small flash drive.)

Well, you have a choice. You can have a file system with multiple forks and have programs operate on the forks they know and care about, or you can store each fork in its own file and have programs be responsible for presenting the facade of a single logical file to the user. Attempting to provide this functionality with a directory of single-fork files is ad-hoc and requires yet more information to identify directories that are part of the same logical file. Formalizing this in the volume format makes it trivial to unambiguously identify files with multiple streams (forks) in them from directories with arbitrary files.

HFS+ (and NTFS) is designed to support arbitrary numbers of forks rather than just the original two, but Apple has yet to expose support for it via the APIs. I think the future lies with arbitrary multi-stream (i.e., multi-fork) files. We already see zip archives being used essentially for this purpose. Making these a formal part of the file system provides consistency and determinism.

-- 

Chris Page - Software Wrangler


 That’s “Chris” with a silent *and* invisible “3”.


 

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 >Re: Dot files (From: "Gary (Lists)" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Dot files (From: Ruth Bygrave <email@hidden>)



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