Re: Standard OS X Compression format
Re: Standard OS X Compression format
- Subject: Re: Standard OS X Compression format
- From: Howard Oakley <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 16:23:20 +0000
On 16/11/01 11:32, "Gregory Block" <email@hidden> wrote:
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As a matter, of fact, on the subject of hfspax:
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The developer, Howard Oakley, has some information here:
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URL: http://homepage.mac.com/howardoakley/
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Now. Looking at this, I'm guessing he's really close to having something
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that's reliable enough for usage. I strongly encourage *ANYONE* who is
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serious about "alternate formats" for compression to try hfspax, archive and
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restore their HFS data, and see how it goes. Report back to him with any
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information you can give him on how that went.
<blush>
I don't think that there is any need for a *single* format - Stuffit does a
wonderful job of handling traditional forked Mac files, and there can be few
Mac users out there without a copy of it or one of its relatives. However,
.tar.gz is much more cross-platform when you haven't got to worry about
forks and Finder info.
Whether you like the pax CPIO archive format (as used by pax and hacked for
hfspax) it does address the current and future complexities of OS X and
Darwin. It is open source (and hfspax will become an open source Darwin
project once I have completed v 1 for OS X, which should I hope be days
rather than weeks) and can readily extend using the same mechanism as used
in hfspax to encompass any type of fork or metadata. I believe that a third
party's work to produce a working hfstar for OS X may use a similar
approach, although with tar format archives.
All I did was follow Apple's lead:
- data forks are stored under their plain file name and path; if you want
to, I suppose you could store with /..namedfork/data appended
- resource forks are stored under their parent name with /..namedfork/rsrc
appended, as flattened data
- Finder info is stored using the same idea, appending /..namedfork/finf as
flattened data.
(Although of course this is not a matter of compression, but of archiving -
how you compress your pax/whatever archive is then more straightforward, as
gnuzip will do nicely.)
Howard.
Dr Howard Oakley * M1BWR: QRV on 2, 4 & 6 m SSB
EHN & DIJ Oakley * Internet email@hidden
Brooklands Lodge * CompuServe 70734,120
Park View Close *
http://www.quercus.demon.co.uk
Wroxall, Ventnor * voice +44 1983 853605
Isle of Wight, PO38 3EQ, UK * fax +44 1983 853253