On Feb 10, 2010, at 1:18 PM, Andrew McNabb wrote:

> Ouch.  I thought that Apple learned in the late '90s that the resource
> fork thing was a design mistake.  When they abandoned resource forks
> with Mac OS X, the Macintosh became a much more Internet-capable
> operating system.  Apparently they unlearned that lesson, and we now
> have at least two people reporting that this makes it harder to
> collaborate with others.  This regression is disappointing.  Anyway,
> thanks for the information.

Actually, Linux, FreeBSD and others support extended attributes also[1]. Not 
doing lots with linux or freebsd recently, I'm not sure how widely they're used 
though. I don't think that having xattrs is inherently a problem, in fact 
they're very convenient and powerful. It's just unfortunate they aren't 
standardized across the various OSes.  The details are frequently 
filesystem-dependent.

The OS X extended attribute API might be API-compatible with FreeBSD; not sure.

> There hasn't been any suggestion to remove cross-platform support from
> PyGUI, has there?  This would surprise me.

No, no. I'm sure the opposite. I was just stating my personal 
perspective/motivation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

--
 Matt Anderson



> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 12:45:25PM -0600, Matt Anderson wrote:
>> 
>> Actually, since 10.4 HFS+ has supported arbitrary extended attributes 
>> (sometimes called 'named forks'), which have become increasingly used for 
>> attaching various data to files. TextMate, for example, saves information 
>> about editing state as extended attributes[1] (caret position, bookmarks, 
>> text folding). They're used by Apple for the "quarantine" subsystem, 
>> finder/spotlight comments, etc.  Snow Leopard does all sorts of other weird 
>> things with extended attributes too[2].  Also, third party software has 
>> started to make use of them for associating arbitrary text "tags" with files 
>> which are findable with spotlight[3]. 
> 
> Ouch.  I thought that Apple learned in the late '90s that the resource
> fork thing was a design mistake.  When they abandoned resource forks
> with Mac OS X, the Macintosh became a much more Internet-capable
> operating system.  Apparently they unlearned that lesson, and we now
> have at least two people reporting that this makes it harder to
> collaborate with others.  This regression is disappointing.  Anyway,
> thanks for the information.
> 
> 
>> In any event, I'll chime in and say I would LOVE to see progress on pygui 
>> accelerate, and a larger community of folks get involved. I personally don't 
>> care so much about the cross-platform aspect of pygui -- I've given myself 
>> over to the Mac for the most part (though occasionally I'll use some other 
>> unix in a server capacity). But I hate programming in Cocoa/PyObjC. I can 
>> hobble along, but I would much prefer to write my entire Mac-only programs 
>> in "pythonic" python (sans Cocoa API) and still have a native GUI. Though, 
>> having them be mostly cross-platform with no additional effort would be a 
>> definite plus.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Andrew McNabb
> http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
> PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55  8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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