Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Ruminations on Arch Desiderata

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 21:05, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> You don't want to do this if you can possibly avoid it.  Let Apple do
> it for you.  They've been dealing with the corner cases for more than
> a decade, maybe two, and the system calls are the right interface to
> insinuate in any case.  (The idea is that either the string really is
> a file system object's name, or what are you doing handing it to the
> system call in the first place?  And the server knows it's an
> AppleTalk server!  But how does tla know if it's a native object or an
> AppleTalk server resource?)  If you try to emulate it within tla for
> non-Apple machines accessing AppleTalk, you probably aren't going to
> get it right.  If you absolutely must, then do it as close to the file
> system interface as you can.

I think you've missed the point. The resource fork is structured data,
that arch could meaningfully interpret, diff, merge and the like. To do
that on apple, system calls can be used. To interoperate with non-mac's,
and to store such versioned data in an arch archive (even on a mac) a
encoding standard needs to be chosen. For that standard, a layer will
need to exist when running on non-macs - and there are applesingle
libraries around...

Rob
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