Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> wrote: > The Mac did this, with resource forks and data > forks, and you may note OS X doesn't do it any longer. I suspect these > will seem like a good idea for a while, until people start discovering > all the things they break, or that break them, and realize that they > didn't learn from history and thus had to repeat it.
The problem with multiple-forked files is interaction with the outter world. When you upload a file on the internet, you loose the non data-forks, except if you serialize in some way (the .hqx format did that just for the mac). How things will work on a NFS filesystem is also an issue: you may not want mv(1) or cp(1) to strip non-data fork Anyway we already have the problem with ffsv1 extended attributes. I added extattr support to cp(1) and mv(1), but there is a lot of work left to do: dump, restore, tar, cpio, zip, unzip, scp, rcp, rsync... Of course there will be situation where protocols or format will not allow preservation of extended attributes. In that case, the program may need to warn the user about lost data. -- Emmanuel Dreyfus http://hcpnet.free.fr/pubz m...@netbsd.org
