On Mar 22, 2007, at 7:35 PM, Michael J. Hußmann wrote:
> That's entirely possible; command line tools usually know zilch about
> the Mac. But who would use a Unix command line tool when there are
> powerful FTP clients such as Interarchy etc.? All the popular FTP
> clients on the Mac have always known about resource forks and how to
> deal with them.
Everything (cp, tar, rsync, etc.) is pretty much smart enough to
handle resource forks appropriately as of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), it's
getting it to handle _all_ the metadata on the file system that's
tricky, but only us Mac system admins ever lose sleep over that one.
tar, of all the tools, is our best friend at the moment.
> But to return to the issue of .zip vs. .sit: when Mac OS X creates
> a .zip archive from a folder, it will preserve the resource forks. It
> will create an archive containing two folders, one with the data forks
> and one with the resource forks. Mac OS X deals with these
> transparently, but users of other operating systems will wonder
> what all
> those funny files prefixed by "._" are supposed to be.
Actually, most operating systems hide files starting with a ., so
they shouldn't even be visible under Windows unless you've
specifically told it to show hidden files.
My only concern with conversion of .sit to .zip is that while we re-
compress them on Mac OS X and therefor preserve any resource forks,
only Mac OS X will be able to read said resource forks. Mac OS 9 and
earlier will see just what Windows/Linux/other-BSD users see: files
stripped of their resource forks and an "OSX" folder (although Mac OS
will show all the ._ files).
There are quite a few people out there (myself included) who still
use the classic Mac OS for occasionally transferring files to/from
their Newtons (and _frequently_ for bootstrapping) as well as Newton
development (whether using a physical Mac or an emulator such as
Basilisk II). We just need to preserve the original .sit files
alongside whatever we decide to do for alternatives (.zip or just
straight .pkg files) for those using older versions of the Mac OS,
that's all.
There has actually been a lot of great information about resource
forks, their use, and how to preserve them, brought up in this
discussion. I hope people found it informative instead of too technical.
Morgan Aldridge
-- morgant@makkintosshu.com http://www.makkintosshu.com/-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/Received on Fri Mar 23 08:30:07 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Mar 23 2007 - 09:30:00 EDT