Re: Standard OS X Compression format
Re: Standard OS X Compression format
- Subject: Re: Standard OS X Compression format
- From: Gregory Block <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 11:32:04 +0000
As a matter, of fact, on the subject of hfspax:
The developer, Howard Oakley, has some information here:
URL:
http://homepage.mac.com/howardoakley/
Now. Looking at this, I'm guessing he's really close to having something
that's reliable enough for usage. I strongly encourage *ANYONE* who is
serious about "alternate formats" for compression to try hfspax, archive and
restore their HFS data, and see how it goes. Report back to him with any
information you can give him on how that went.
If people want to see public backup/restore tools in the open source
community, and ways of solving these problems for the Darwin folks,
developers like this will need our help.
Apple still needs to be pushed to deliver solutions that work for the Darwin
community and help to solve these problems outside of the Carbon and Cocoa
frameworks.
Here's the version history from the readme for hfspax 1.0fc3:
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Version 1.0fc3 is the first version believed to implement the -k option
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properly, which previously did not work as far as resource forks and Finder
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info were concerned. Further testing of other options, notably -a and -T, has
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been carried out and they appear to work as advertised. Unless anyone finds
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significant bugs, I'd like this to be version 1.0 final release.
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Version 1.0fc2 contains significant bug fixes. Previous versions could not
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write out resource forks to files with long (> 31 characters) file names, nor
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to files with Unicode filenames (e.g. using double-byte encoding such as
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Kanji). These limitations are now believed to be fixed, and it is also
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possible that resource forks can be written out to files whose names include
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the colon ':' character. However, the latter is deprecated in Mac OS X, so I
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would not advise you to try it out! Thanks to Jim Correia for reporting these
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bugs and for suggesting how they could be fixed. Note that these bugs only
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affected -r mode, so archives made using earlier versions of hfspax should
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still be perfectly usable. This version was released on 14 August 2001.
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Version 1.0fc1 contains one significant bug fix. Versions prior to this did
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not work when unarchiving (-r) to volumes other than the startup volume. This
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now appears to have been fully corrected. However, the -k limitation noted
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above has been picked up but not fixed this time. This version was released on
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13 August 2001.
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Version 1.0a2 contains three (possibly more!) bug fixes. The first addresses
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some circumstances in which unpacking a cpio format archive would result in
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error messages but still write the files out correctly. The second addresses
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an oddity found with Apple's AirPort utility files, which for some bizarre
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reason seem to contain blank chunks in their resource forks. This was
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confusing the code intended to deal with large zeroed chunks in data files,
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and caused errors in trying to write out the resource fork. The third bug to
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be addressed was that Finder info would be stored for links, and attempts made
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to write it out; this should no longer happen. Thank you Derrick Bass for
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reporting these bugs. Some other code has been cleaned up. Documentation has
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also been augmented in response to demand. This version released for testing
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on 1 July 2001.
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Version 1.0a1 first released to the select and brave band of alpha testers 10
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June 2001. Unleashed on a wider public on 17 June 2001, with no significant
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bugs being reported by the alpha testers - thank you Keith, Cec and Claire!
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For the first public alpha release, documentation augmented and improved.