Re: Aliases & fileAttributesAtPath:
Re: Aliases & fileAttributesAtPath:
- Subject: Re: Aliases & fileAttributesAtPath:
- From: Brendan Younger <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 14:00:14 -0400
On Sunday, October 14, 2001, at 07:19 AM, Ondra Cada wrote:
<snip>
There is ONE AND ONLY ONE way how to support aliases so that they can be
really used in the plethora of tools and applications which are
available: to
implement them in the filesystem level, so that they are just as
transparent
from _PATH_ point of view as links are.
Nice to know you're open to suggestions, Ondra. If you would stop to
think for a moment about how much you desire to use absolute paths,
perhaps you can understand how others feel about technology which they
find eminently useful too. If it helps to ease the pain of transition,
just think of aliases as symlinks on steroids. Both solve the problem
of being able to find a crucial file and both present the same
difficulty; namely, whether to treat the alias/symlink as a full-fledged
file in it's own right or to have it simply fall-through to the file it
points to. If someone suggested creating a new, better type of symlink
which could find files even if the path was changed, you'd probably be
all for it. However, you show a zealousness for what you were brought
up with which is as ludicrous to a Mac user as a Windows user claiming
the registry is the greatest leap of design and ease of use Microsoft
has ever invented.
One of the great strengths of Mac OS X is quite simply that it *does*
support so many disparate features that a user and/or developer can
choose exactly which one works best for them. Supporting these features
is the developer's burden. As a user, you may chose whether to use
them. Don't mix the two by thinking that everything which is convenient
for you as a developer is automatically convenient for all your users.
Brendan Younger