Re: [Monotone-devel] Mac OS X - resource fork empty after checkout

[Patrick Georgi]

Brian May schrieb:
> - Microsoft has introduced something similar in Windows (Vista?) (for
> compatibility with Mac OS?).
>   
NTFS supports data streams for years and years already.
Windows 2000 at least already makes use of them for various purposes, 
too (and I think NT4 already had them. Simple access method, too: 
filename.txt:streamname.
You can even "hide" programs there: given an executable named 
readme.txt:foobar, do 'start readme.txt:foobar', but explorer and the 
likes will only show readme.txt and its main content)
> - As such Samba needs to be able to support it.
>   
Doesn't need to - windows doesn't support streams on FAT, so samba can 
just pretend to not have streams either.
> - Apple now consider resource forks obsolete as of Max OS X for
> compatibility with Unix.
>   
Obsolete, but supported.
> I don't know which of these are true or not, but I have heard it has
> resulted in heated discussions on the Linux kernel mailing list if
> Linux should support it or not in order to allow Samba to support it.
>
> What Linux does have instead (and right now) are extended attributes -
> not quite the same thing, but similar. Extended attributes are
> designed for small pieces of information, but resource forks can
> potentially be very large.
>   
Given the right filesystem, EAs can be arbitrarily sized - it's more of 
a limitation of the filesystem than the API.
As for APIs: the POSIX version of EA support never left draft state as 
far as I know (similar to ACLs), and might or might not be available on 
unixoid systems and to varying degrees.

> A fork is just a separate stream in the file - a bit like if the file
> was really a directory and the forks are files in that directory.
>   
.. without a standard way to query that directory.


patrick georgi