Re: NSFileManager and aliases
Re: NSFileManager and aliases
- Subject: Re: NSFileManager and aliases
- From: "Clark S. Cox III" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 12:21:21 -0400
On 04/16/2002 04:52, "Ondra Cada" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 10:29 , Thomas Lachand-Robert wrote:
>
>
> Now a suggestion (fell free to comment, eventually we could file a
>
> feature request on this):
>
> I think a useful improvement to aliases would be to have them recognized
>
> as symbolic links by the Unix tools. If I understand well the machinery,
>
> it should not be very difficult:
>
> -- Aliases doesn't need to have data fork (I don't know if they have, but
>
> usually they don't, they appear as 0-sized files in the terminal.
>
> -- Symbolic links doesn't have any resource fork, but the path is coded
>
> somewhere in their data fork.
>
>
>
> So a simple solution would be to have all aliases copying the path they
>
> already store inside their data fork, in addition to their resource fork.
>
>
At the first look this seems nice. Add a system-wide switch "use path
>
primarily" or "use fsref primarily", and I guess we would be quite close
>
to a really good solution.
>
>
From the symlink POV it looks really nice (of course, unless I am
>
overlooking something obvious ;)). Anyone who understand aliases well
>
wants to comment on from that POV?
I personally think that this would be a wonderful solution. If every
alias were also a sym-link as well, suddenly every UNIX tool/function out
there would automagically aliases as links (which IMHO is the main drawback
to the implementation of aliases on OSX). I also wish that it would be great
if the Finder presented the option to the user of what kind of alias/link to
create when the "Make alias" command is chosen, or something is
command-option-dragged. Something along the lines of:
Create Both (default choice)
Create Link
Create Alias
Then, we would also need a (system-wide) option that controlled what to
do when the two pieces of information were out-of-sync, and a program tried
to resolve the alias file using the AliasManager API:
Don't change the file, use the alias (default choice)
Don't change the file, use the link
Update the alias to match the link
Update the link to match the alias
--
Clark S. Cox III
http://clarkcox.dyndns.org/
email@hidden
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