Re: Cocoa stripping resource forks: does Jaguar fix?
Re: Cocoa stripping resource forks: does Jaguar fix?
- Subject: Re: Cocoa stripping resource forks: does Jaguar fix?
- From: Kirk Kerekes <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 09:20:27 -0500
On Tuesday, July 2, 2002, at 10:57 PM, email@hidden
wrote:
On Tuesday, July 2, 2002, at 10:00 , Kirk Kerekes wrote:
We are not working on a BSD system here, even though one is buried
underneath. We are working on a HFS+ filesystem that explicitly supports
resource forks.
And that pretty much ends the discussion. When working inside this
filesystem...
Again, you are wrong.
BSD is a portable API. posix is portable API. The very same stands for
shell scripts. Cocoa should be a portable API, though Apple has messed up
OpenStep considerably.
Therefore, if a filesystem wants to work under it, *IT* has to support
what's needed -- not by dirty tricks like the special names, but by a way
which can be reconciled with the *STANDARD* techniques of BSD, posix,
shell scripts, OpenStep, whatever. If it does not, it's its fault -- in
this case, the blame is on the side of HFS+.
Cocoa/OpenStep is now a tool of the Mac experience, not a separate,
discrete entity that happens to be residing on a Mac at the moment. This is
one of the hardest lessons for the "step" folk to take. While the Mac
community jokes that "NextStep acquired Apple", the reality of the
marketplace is that OSX _must_ operate the way that Mac _USERS_ want, not
the way that openStep purists would like.
If Cocoa "must" be a portable API, then it is COCOA's job to be capable of
being used correctly on all target systems -- and that includes being
responsible for correctly preserving user data, even if it is in a format
that Cocoa does not understand.
How "portable" are file packages, anyway? How "portable" are ".rsrc" files?
How portable are colon-separated paths? Yet Cocoa supports them all,
because they represent the _requirements_ of the Mac filesystem.
Supporting resource forks is no different -- just one of the _requirements_
of being a good Mac citizen.
And such support does not damage portability (a total straw-man issue).
Forked files are a superset of flat files, so the ability to handle forked
files does not affect the ability to handle flat files on systems which are
limited to them.
And Apple's AppleSingle/AppleDouble techniques for flattening forked files
are readily available, universally documented and well understood.
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