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HFS+ is crazy

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Re: HFS+ is crazy

#191
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Jobs really know/care about technical details like what filesystem OS X used?

At one point it was a significant bullet point in the list of features being added to OS X Server. It was a big deal. I'm sure he was aware of it. http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-announces-zfs-on-snow-leo...

I used OS X Server in 2008. It had major quality issues that seemed to only get worse with subsequent releases. Several advertised features accessible from the UI didn't work or straight-up broke things. I doubt Jobs paid much attention to it.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#192
post #76
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're not right. There are so many wonderful filesystems already out there, many of them already Open Source. I'm not against research, but I'd rather have Apple fund one of these existing efforts.

Which? Apple won't adopt anything GPL, so BTRFS, XFS, JFS, etc--basically every Linux project is right out. It was almost ZFS, years ago, but Apple backed out when Oracle bought Sun. What out there is modern, good, and under a compatible license? HAMMER?

btrfs, zfs, and any other checksumming FS is useless without ECC RAM.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there is http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page and FreeBSD has been proving the implementations reliability for some time now. Apple could adopt it. They don't. That's probably because the desktop OS is on life support, and there are indications Apple wants to abandon it in favor of a migration to a wholly iOS model.

There are no such indications.

The derelict OS, continued lockdown of OSX, UI convergence, iPad Pro as a "laptop replacement", the OSX Store having an even worse developer experience than the iOS store, the OSX store letting a cert expire.

Oh, and the MacBook line is essentially stagnant as a product line. Basically Apple let's Intel redo the MacBook guts while its hardware teams are hard at work on improving their own architecture for the iPad Pro, which is very clearly a vision of computing that is more like iOS.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there is http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Main_Page and FreeBSD has been proving the implementations reliability for some time now. Apple could adopt it. They don't. That's probably because the desktop OS is on life support, and there are indications Apple wants to abandon it in favor of a migration to a wholly iOS model.

I think your right that Apple is more focused on iOS. I can't figure out how Apple expects developers to create apps for iOS if OS X goes away.

If they can make a passable XCode experience on the iPad Pro, it'll work. People write surface apps on surface devices.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#195
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mac Classic, if you wanted to ship a custom font with your application, you'd put it in the Resource fork in a resource of "FONT" type. So why wouldn't a stand-alone font file consist of a Resource fork with a single resource of "FONT" type? Otherwise, the OS engineers have to develop two entirely different ways of reading in font data. Why duplicate the effort? The system made perfect sense, both then and now. It…

>On Mac Classic, if you wanted to ship a custom font with your application, you'd put it in the Resource fork in a resource of "FONT" type. On Windows you can do the same thing with .rsrc in an .exe/.dll file. It's possible you would ship a font as a PE .dll with a font resource, but for a single file the encapsulation is a little unnecessary (unless your application architecture already makes it easy to deal with PE…

Except that in the windows example you gave the .rsrc section is part of the main data stream. It is counted in the file's size when doing a dir command. When the file is copied by all command line and shell tools or sent over the internet the data in the .rsrc section is copied/sent just like all the other data in the exe/dll.

None of this is true for the resource fork in the Mac case.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ext4 deprecation hangs in the air and it's not very good filesystem, btrfs is probably the future and it's slowly becoming production ready.

yah absolutely ext4 has progressively had its' performance reduced because what made it faster than ext3 created a lot of corner cases that make it far less reliable, and Btrfs is at least a fresh design, but doesn't seem to be particularly ready and is not even proven as a reliable design. It's good that we have more than one filesystem. HFS+ functionally works well for a Mac because the Mac is designed around it, b…

> what made it faster than ext3 created a lot of corner cases that make it far less reliable

That is an odd claim, considering that the ext3 implementation has been removed from the kernel this year, and various distributions have for several years already used the ext4 driver to mount ext3 filesystems.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/8/31/22

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#197
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which? Apple won't adopt anything GPL, so BTRFS, XFS, JFS, etc--basically every Linux project is right out. It was almost ZFS, years ago, but Apple backed out when Oracle bought Sun. What out there is modern, good, and under a compatible license? HAMMER?

btrfs, zfs, and any other checksumming FS is useless without ECC RAM.

Not any more useless than any other (non-checksumming) filesystem.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple abandoned ZFS when Steve Jobs was still alive. Larry Ellison has frequently described Steve Jobs as one of his best friends whom he frequently went on walks with. The idea that Steve could not have gotten Larry to license ZFS seems crazy to me.

Did Jobs really know/care about technical details like what filesystem OS X used?

Why would you think he wasn't? Many anecdotes mention him micromanaging minute details, and many of the things he mentions in keynotes are highly technical as well as low-level.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not strike me as a sane design. You already have file extensions, unique prefixes (like those used by the 'file' command to identify files). Why would you use fs forks to differentiate between file types?

Actually, Classic Mac OS used type and creator codes, which were attributes on files, to identify filetypes, not resources.

That makes more sense.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't put the entire content of a file in an extended attribute, would you?

There are various arbitrary restrictions in various filesystems and operating systems. The intention is to store smaller amounts of useful information with the file. Smaller means in the bytes/kilobytes range. For example you wouldn't store multi-gigabyte alternate language versions of a video file in its extended attributes. But you could store URLs of where to get them. Or you could attach authorship, review, dates…

Thanks for the recommendation, that book looks interesting.
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