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Apple File System

developer.apple.com

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Re: Apple File System

#91

Post by bjt »

crucialfelix wrote: post #81
entee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably as with today, you'll have the option. I don't have a strong opinion on case sensitivity of file names, but I suspect they'll keep it case insensitive by default. I think for the average non-technical user that two files, "MyFile.txt" and "myfile.txt", being different could lead to some confusion, and Apple historically has apparently considered that confusion unacceptable.

More problematic is that many case insensitive hard drives would be copied into new machines and there would be millions of conflicts. Some utility would have to sit there and annoy people by asking them to make decisions.

I can see why there would be conflicts going case sensitive -> case insensitive, but I can't see why there would be conflicts going the other way. Am I missing something?

Re: Apple File System

#92

Post by baldfat »

cjbprime wrote: post #22

I hope they don't patent it and go after Linux implementations, as Microsoft did with exfat.

Well the issue was that was a closed file system owned by Microsoft and used on Linux for Flash Drives and SD Cards.

If you sue closed technology you get burned. I didn't have a problem with Microsoft doing what they did. We should have used an open file system for those devices. I personally have used ext2/rfs on my drives and it is a pretty light security system ;)

Re: Apple File System

#94

Post by amock »

tambourine_man wrote: post #73
amock wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also didn't see any mention of compression. Hopefully those are at least being worked on and just didn't make it into the docs yet.

HFS+ already supports compression and it says APFS would support nearly all of the features of HFS+ , so there's hope.

I had forgotten about that. I don't really know how HFS+ compression works, so I'll wait and see APFS turns out.

Re: Apple File System

#96

Post by regularfry »

entee wrote: post #76

It would be really nice is there was a modern file system that "just worked" regardless of device. I'm tired of having exFAT/FAT being the only filesystem I can reliably use on multiple different OS-es painlessly, and even then I can't use it for all the functions of those OS-es (No time machine). Hopefully this will be open enough to enable that, though who knows how it will shake out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format ? That looked hopeful last I was juggling with this sort of thing, but that was long enough ago that WinXP support was the killer.

Re: Apple File System

#97

Post by karlshea »

killercup wrote: post #45

> Flash / SSD Optimization I.e., a "unique copy-on-write design" > Space Sharing Basically, ZFS datasets. > Snapshots If those can be sent: Finally Time Machine done right. > The AFP protocol is deprecated and cannot be used to share APFS formatted volumes. Interesting. > An open source implementation is not available at this time. Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format when Apple File System is r…

> > Snapshots

> If those can be sent: Finally Time Machine done right.

If this ends up being true I can't wait—it's so frustrating watching tiny incremental backups take forever over the network. It seems like "Preparing" and "Cleaning up" take longer than moving the data.

Re: Apple File System

#98

Post by dang »

DannyB2 wrote: post #68

Complain if you want, but you seem to forget that it is from Apple. And that makes it somehow better with magical goodness that nobody else could attain. Apple's engineers are not mere humans like every other 'ordinary' tech company would hire. /s

Please don't. Comments like this make the discussion quite a bit worse in their own right.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11897039 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Apple File System

#99

Post by wmf »

speleding wrote: post #89
entee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably as with today, you'll have the option. I don't have a strong opinion on case sensitivity of file names, but I suspect they'll keep it case insensitive by default. I think for the average non-technical user that two files, "MyFile.txt" and "myfile.txt", being different could lead to some confusion, and Apple historically has apparently considered that confusion unacceptable.

For the end-user they could prevent duplicate different-cased file names in the UI layer (the Finder), instead of the file system. That would be a more appropriate place for it anyway.

And then some code using Unix APIs would create two files whose names differ only in case and the UI layer would choke. This is why spray-on usability is bad.

Re: Apple File System

#100

Post by mikeash »

entee wrote: post #60
imglorp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will they deploy it case insensitive, still?

Presumably as with today, you'll have the option. I don't have a strong opinion on case sensitivity of file names, but I suspect they'll keep it case insensitive by default. I think for the average non-technical user that two files, "MyFile.txt" and "myfile.txt", being different could lead to some confusion, and Apple historically has apparently considered that confusion unacceptable.

The average user is also confused by "MyFile.txt" and " MyFile.txt" being different, or "Proposal II" and "Proposal 2" being different, but filesystems aren't usually built around that. I don't think case sensitivity is special enough to get that sort of treatment.
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