Is there a filesystem that can fragment a large, existing file to perform arbitrary inserts?
APFS filesystem format
41–50 of 148 posts
Re: APFS filesystem format
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit? Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
They didn't open WebKit. It's a fork of the LGPL'd KHTML code base. Apple is legally obliged to keep it open, so whatever anyone thinks about Apple's open source record using WebKit as an example makes little sense.
Eh, not quite. Apple could satisfy its LGPL obligations by throwing source dumps of WebCore over the wall - without releasing the rest of WebKit, exposing SVN history, or having a public bug tracker. In fact, for the first two years of Safari's life, that's exactly what they did. Then in 2005 they opened it up properly, voluntarily:
https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bu...
Re: APFS filesystem format
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
> Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community.
I am no fan of Apple myself, but it's worth giving them credit where credit is due, they did everything right when open-sourcing Swift and are very responsive to the community, there's really no downside for anybody here, so why the need to criticise? It only needlessly provides the wrong incentives.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
> Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community.
As opposed to whom? Choosing an open source approach is a strategic decision, presumably to the benefit of the chooser.
This was even true of Cygnus, the original Open Source business.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#45Kaitai which was used as a parser for this looks pretty interesting. I need to reverse engineer some of the Allen Bradley Ethernet Industrial Protocol and its client communication. This seems pretty useful for documenting that.
http://kaitai.io/ Also check out https://ohmlang.github.io/ and view the maths demo in your local copy.
Holy shit this is so cool. I will never have a need for this but it's really amazing to poke around with. It kind of feels like Wireshark for files instead of packets.
They also have a web version[0] with a bunch of example files if you want to check it out without installing it locally.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#46Is there any reason to use APFS on desktop?
There are a couple features missing from HFS+. Some of these are implemented in APFS: * Case sensitivity * Clones extents / ranges (reflinking) * Holes in the middle of files * ACLs * Collapsing file ranges * Per file compression and per file encryption These are useful for apps like SQLite or other stores which implement a multi user, log structured store.
What about snapshots? Does APFS offer efficient user-created snapshots? I run Ubuntu with btrfs, and for me this is a killer feature.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said the same about Facetime and iMessages but never opened or documented those, so let's see when and if it actually happens. Apple has a history of false promises when it comes to opening and documenting their protocols & data formats. Edit: I misrecalled that iMessage was announced as something they were opening.
They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
Regarding Apple’s Open Source strategy, the WebKit origin story is a major disaster.
They forked an existing project, only did sourcedumps every few months, often stripped of all comments, refused to work with the original devs that they had forked from (the KDE KHTML engine), etc.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a couple features missing from HFS+. Some of these are implemented in APFS: * Case sensitivity * Clones extents / ranges (reflinking) * Holes in the middle of files * ACLs * Collapsing file ranges * Per file compression and per file encryption These are useful for apps like SQLite or other stores which implement a multi user, log structured store.
What about snapshots? Does APFS offer efficient user-created snapshots? I run Ubuntu with btrfs, and for me this is a killer feature.
> Does APFS offer efficient user-created snapshots?
Yes: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/02/testing-out-snapshots-...
I'm hoping it will make Time Machine a lot better.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said the same about Facetime and iMessages but never opened or documented those, so let's see when and if it actually happens. Apple has a history of false promises when it comes to opening and documenting their protocols & data formats. Edit: I misrecalled that iMessage was announced as something they were opening.
They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average. In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't.
Clang, WebKit and Swift are "proper" open source projects, done in the open. But there aren't many of those. They have no open source apps, and most frameworks such as Cocoa, AppKit etc. are completely proprietary.
Some of their open source efforts have been half-hearted; Darwin was enthusiastically embraced by the community, then essentially shut down by Apple. The XNU sources are APL, but there's nothing open about its development. I/O Kit is closed, I believe.
Re: APFS filesystem format
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't con…
> Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. I am no fan of Apple myself, but it's worth giving them credit where credit is due, they did everything right when open-sourcing Swift and are very responsive to the community, there's really no downside for anybody here, so why the need to criticise? It only needlessly provides the wrong incentives.
It is not criticism. It's an observation, followed by a question. I'm honestly interested in why Apple has the reputation it does around open source. The replies in the sub thread have been enlightening.