> On an unrelated note, there was some mention of inode-based aliases > earlier. I am not entirely sure what this is intended to mean. In > UNIX, we have two things like aliases - soft links and hard links. A > soft link is just a pointer to a file name. A hard link is just > another reference to a file's inode. Creating a hard link increments > the file's reference count, and the file is not deleted until the last > hard link is removed. These are not really aliases, however, since > they are have first-class status. On MacOS, aliases are a higher level > construct. They point at files in an abstract file space, which is > shared across all drives connected to the system. This allows the > destination of an alias to be moved around between drives without > breaking the alias, which seems a much better solution than depending > on inodes.
Sometimes I say things without knowing fully what I mean... I'm a designer... be patient with me :) Mostly I just want to make sure that the way we implement shortcuts/aliases keeps the links intact when moving the target file. That means we shouldn't use path names as references to a file. I thought inodes were the solution, but maybe there is a better way. This all stems from this article: http://mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374 (see item #4) Perhaps we could do something like what OS X does with it's .vol folder: http://www.westwind.com/reference/OS-X/invisibles.html J.
