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: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 10:51:06 +0000
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On 20/11/01 12:54 pm, "Marcel Weiher" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Yes, I see the attraction of this, and I must admit I am attracted as
>
well. However, this is a translation of a native file-system format to
>
a simulation of that file-system format. While a nice feature, that is
>
the task of a different program.
So, what you're telling me is that unlike a zip archive, or an ordinary tar,
an hfstar archive is really only valuable to a user of UFS and network
filesystems when he or she chooses to use an HFS disk to unarchive to.
While there are a lot of arguments you can make for choosing not to support
._*, I don't believe the one you just made was a very good one.
If your goal is backup and restore, then is it okay to demand that the
restore media be an identical filesystem to the backed up source? If that's
okay, then you have a pretty good argument for saying that you've got a good
backup/restore mechanism. However, as a more "living" work, where people
archive and unarchive their work on a regular or semi-regular basis, I think
you can understand why demanding Finder compatibility is arguably one of the
most difficult user demands to meet, and also one of the most attractive
features, regardless of the difficulties one might have.
Essentially: Anyone who isn't support ._* isn't supporting finder-level use
of the information on anything but an HFS disk. Tell me how the work you've
done has gotten the community *ANY FURTHER* than StuffIt - which, much like
your solutions, archive and unarchive HFS filesystems just fine, and leave
them useless on non-HFS filesystems.
What we need is something that integrates mac users into the rest of the
networked environment, not a series of open-sourced islands that demand that
users only access, out of the many filesystems out there, these files over
HFS filesystems on AppleTalk networks.