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

[Damien Elmes]

Robert Collins <address@hidden> writes:

> 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...

I don't know much at all about development on Apple machines, but was
under the impression that resource forks are deprecated [1], on the
grounds that they make it difficult to interoperate with other
platforms. 

Does applesingle attempt to solve the problem of the extra metadata
you mention as well? It just seems like a nasty thing for Arch to have
to deal with. Would the ability to store arbitrary metadata at the
Arch level solve the problem in a more general way?

[1]
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/SystemOverview/FileSystem/chapter_9_section_5.html

Cheers,
-- 
Damien Elmes