Re: Why no work on rsync?
Re: Why no work on rsync?
- Subject: Re: Why no work on rsync?
- From: email@hidden (Peter Seebach)
- Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:36:40 -0600
In message <email@hidden>, Andrew White writes:
>The same is true of resource forks. It's not "two files", it's one file
>with two (3 including system metadata) logical parts: one structured and
>one unstructured. The problem isn't the model, the problem is that it
>doesn't map well to Unix where a file is assumed to have one unstructured
>part only.
This is somewhat true, however... Nonetheless, it turns out to be a major
source of bugs and confusion. A tiny fraction of the files I've ever dealt
with have had both data and resource forks, except for the very weird PPC/68k
binaries that existed under OS 9. Nearly everything else was EITHER a
resource file OR a data file, in which case, a single fork would have been
enough...
And meanwhile, bundles have solved all the other problems.
With the benefit of hindsight, bundles work better than forks. Anything
a fork can do, a bundle can also do. Bundles can do many things forks can't.
Bundles work transparently with unmodified code for archiving, because they
fit into the hierarchy model.
I think a lot of debates on this get bogged down because it's obviously true
that the resource structures are cool, but in practice, most of what they're
used for could be done with resource-only files.
I mean, I guess I have to grant that "image thumbnails" are sort of cool, but
it's a pretty specialized application. I don't think, in the long run, the
cost in code maintenance has been remotely worth it. On the other hand, I
don't necessarily think those engineers were wrong; they made an interesting
decision, and we learned a lot from it. It's just that, now, we have this
extra thing to deal with, forever.
-s
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