Re: [NTLK] Stuff It......why I now hate it

From: matthiasm <mm_at_matthiasm.com>
Date: Thu Mar 22 2007 - 18:53:06 EDT

On Mar 22, 2007, at 10:58 PM, Michael J. Hußmann wrote:

>> Buuuut, for all those stuck with OS pre-X, resource and data forks
>> are important. On a Mac, files have two forks that are very
>> independent. Resource forks used to define a lot of the inner
>> workings of applications, their signatures, icons, windows, widgets,
>> texts, etc. etc. . Data forks contained only the executable code.
>
> There are still native Mac OS X apps that are structured like this.
> Applications don't have to be application packages.

Yes, you can still use them, but they are certain to go away.
Actually, stand-alone UI apps *had* to have a resource fork in OS X
or they would never get activated or brought to the top. There is
documented interface now to get around this. "TransformProcessType()"
and "CPSEnableForegroundOperation()".
>
> Many applications were smart enough to preserve the resource fork.
> Since
> about 1990, the Finder could copy Mac files to FAT volumes (which
> didn't
> know about forks), storing the two forks transparently as two files.

Yes, creating eternal chaos. If you were to copy a file by name, the
resource fork would not be copied. Even the original OS X "tar",
"cp", "mv", etc. commands (until 10.2) did not know about resource
forks and destroy applications. This has cost us endless headaches
and many support calls to the point that we almost abandoned OS X
support altogether.

> Mac OS X still does this, albeit differently from Mac OS. When you
> uploaded
> Mac files to an FTP server, the FTP client would automagically encode
> the file in the MacBinary format, again preserving the resource fork,
> plus type and creator codes and other meta-data.

The command line "ftp" that came with OS X did not do that. I have
not checked after 10.1, but I doubt it would.

But hey, I am drifting off in my flu-fueled rant ;-)

All I wanted to say originally was, that we need to be very careful
when converting .sit archives to .zip archives as we may lose some
essential information. NTK project files for example store most
project settings in the resource fork.

Matthias

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Received on Thu Mar 22 18:53:10 2007

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