isn't this one of those perpetual internet wheel of time discussions?
in any case, i'm with you here. all of the unix-based appleshare
servers that use posixy filesystems that i'm aware of use a
.AppleDouble/.resource/.whatever. interface to the filesystem. of
course this makes splitting forks a problem if you're not careful, but
that's always going to be the case unless you stay on a filesystem
that has a concept of forks to begin with. apple, of course, chose the
latter course by using the non-posixy parts of hfsplus.
having said that, i actually think that keeping associated bits
bundled together would be a good idea in a number of cases. i'm
particularly interested in appleshare (although i'll be solving those
issues by going the database route), but i think being able to give
the filesystem hints on what to keep together would be a good idea in
general. however, i would much rather have something like an hfs-style
interface to that bundling. that way, we can specify things like
"mount -o afpd" and get the .AppleDouble layout that i want or "mount
-o bundle" and have .bundle directories everywhere. so, for
AppleDouble style forks, we get the following:
d/file
d/.AppleDouble
d/.AppleDouble/.Parent
d/.AppleDouble/file
for something that wants to handle arbitrary forks, we can have the
following:
d/file
d/.bundle
d/.bundle/.Parent/fork1
d/.bundle/.Parent/fork2
d/.bundle/file/a
d/.bundle/file/b
d/.bundle/file/c
if you want to bundle some info together, you just create something in
the special dot directory. that way, something like reiserfs will get
auto-tuned for any filesystem usage that's desired, all the standard
unix commands still work, files are transferrable to non-fork
understanding filesystems, and your program can work without
modification on less hintable filesystems.
-a
-
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