Re: buffer cache & ufs changes (preliminary ffsv2 extattr support)

[manu%netbsd.org@localhost (Emmanuel Dreyfus)]

Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:

> The Mac did this, with resource forks and data
> forks, and you may note OS X doesn't do it any longer.  I suspect these
> will seem like a good idea for a while, until people start discovering
> all the things they break, or that break them, and realize that they
> didn't learn from history and thus had to repeat it.

The problem with multiple-forked files is interaction with the outter
world. When you upload a file on the internet, you loose the non
data-forks, except if you serialize in some way (the .hqx format did
that just for the mac). How things will work on a NFS filesystem is also
an issue: you may not want mv(1) or cp(1) to strip non-data fork

Anyway we already have the problem with ffsv1 extended attributes. I
added extattr support to cp(1) and mv(1), but there is a lot of work
left to do: dump, restore, tar, cpio, zip, unzip, scp, rcp, rsync...  Of
course there will be situation where protocols or format will not allow
preservation of extended attributes. In that case, the program may need
to warn the user about lost data.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
http://hcpnet.free.fr/pubz
manu%netbsd.org@localhost