On Mar 4, 2006, at 5:18 AM, Peter Seebach wrote: I have a hard time imagining anyone but Apple ever caring about resource forks. The inconsistency with the fundamental UNIX file model is simply too great.
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. "Resource forks", sure, but POSIX Extended Attributes, of which ResForks are now simply a subset, are a feature of several UNIX OSes now (and, unless you want to contrive some entirely unique metadata storage scenario, necessary for the implementation of ACLs). In Tiger, rsync simply knows about EAs and Resource Forks come along for the ride. The bigger problem is that there is no standardized POSIX (or UNIX03) API for EAs yet. FreeBSD went one way, Linux went another way, and Apple (who needed some additional parameter info) couldn't quite adopt either of the two APIs as its own and went yet another way. Windows, of course, went yet another way still with the NTFS Streams API (no surprise to anyone there).
So, in short, in the abstract sense there is general interest in having tools like cp(1) and rsync(1) (to say nothing of the serializing archivers like tar and cpio) deal gracefully with EAs, but it looks like Apple's out on the end of the spear right now with respect to actually deploying EA-based solutions. Linux has probably had EAs support the longest (in the open source world, anyway), but it's not clear to me that they actually use them for anything yet.
- Jordan
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