On 2007-12-29, at 17:24, Michael G Schwern wrote:
Oh god, how many things are wrong here. Macs have long had extra file
meta-data integrated right into the file separate from the data,
which is a
great idea.
It's a hateful idea.
Unless everyone does it, and does it the same way, and it's
COMPLETELY visible without using magic utilities, it's hateful. If
they could make it so that when you listed a file with a resource
fork it showed up as "drw-r--r-- .... file" containing "file/rsrc"
and "file/data", that would be peachy, but no. They go halfway
there... you can open file/.rsrc... but you can't tell if there's
a .rsrc there, without hateful magic.
Apple has been moving away from this, using directories instead of
files, which is completely equivalent (there's no technical
difference between a directory containing two files and a file
containing two forks (see above), except you need magic OS-specific
code to enumerate the forks, and the code is DIFFERENT for Mac OS 9,
OS X, BeOS, and NTFS.
And don't get me started on OS/1100.
Even Spotlight uses the file metadata as a cache or index only, and
the actual spotlight database is stored in a regular file.
Which is as it should be. Metadata about a file outside the file is
hateful, even if it's just the one bit of metadata that UNIX needs
(the execute bit) it causes pain.
The more Apple mucks it up, the more people will quit trying to stuff
crap in there, and the more we'll get back to a sane flat file.
Sometimes hate is nothing but tough love.
