Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- Subject: Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- From: Wade Tregaskis <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 21:57:28 +1000
Tar, gzip, bz2, etc. trash MacOS metadata and resource forks and thus
should not be used to distribute Mac files.
Should not be used for files which use these obsolete things. For
those that do, sit of course has support for these legacy items.
Also, what seems to be missed here is the fact that 90% of files
downloaded by your average user don't contain executable items.
Images, text files, icon libraries, etc. I don't want some bloated
disc image just for a few icons.
StuffIt is a proprietary format and can trash UNIX metadata such as
file permissions. In addition, it has a nasty habit of truncating long
filenames. The new version of StuffIt corrects these problems, but has
other bugs, still is proprietary, still costs money, and to boot
there's no guarantee that your users will have the latest StuffIt
Expander.
StuffIt Expander ships with OS X. Even if for some reason you've
deleted it, it's a free download. It doesn't hassle you to register or
anything similar, and can be easily configured to operate transparently
in the background. It's ability to decompress files into a specific
directory is most useful.
If permissions and the like are an issue, you should probably use a
custom installer - there's no guarantee anything will be preserved even
with disc images.
Even better, make your app not rely on any specific permissions - who's
to say they won't be changed at any time anyway? If it must have
certain permissions, it should deal with them itself.
Disk images are easy to use, are guaranteed preserve *any* metadata
that the file system can support, and are supported by all versions of
Mac OS X, out of the box. In addition, disk images have some nifty
little features like the ability to mount remotely over the network
using the "hdiutil" command-line tool, allowing you to just get one
file out of an archive without having to download the whole thing, and
download without leaving a garbage file behind on the desktop.
Disk images take forever to mount, are buggy to eject and manipulate,
as mentioned, and are a general pain. Ever tried to mount a thousand
or so at once? If you start now you might be able to before your
computer rusts.
If disc images could be browsed like folders, could be mounted
somewhere away from the real volumes (maybe into a specific
user-determined folder), and/or could have their contents extracted to
a user-determined location by default, then they'd actually be usable.
Oh, and if they worked a heck of a lot faster than they do now.
Oh, and Apple recommends it too.
Apple does a lot of things, and some of them aren't very intelligent.
File extensions come to mind. And metadata & resource forks. But then
again you don't seem to have a problem breaking the rules there...
selective hearing, maybe?
Wade Tregaskis
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