On Jan 21, 2008, at 6:16 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote:

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> On Jan 22, 2008 12:02 PM, Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> wrote:
>> I'd imagine writing an OS to be a horrifically complicated task.  
>> And yes, I
>> can certainly imagine HFS+ might have issues when used to back an  
>> NFS server
>> with other clients, but that still leads back to the original  
>> point, which
>> is that all these problems stem from the differences between HFS+  
>> and other
>> filesystems, not any inherent problem with HFS+ itself.
>
> Right. If you are defining the requirements for a new FS on a new OS,
> would you not include a requirement that says "must not add any funny
> rule that prevents clean interoperation with other filesystems or
> OSs"? Forgetting that requirement is... a big one! And if someone asks
> "how do we do nice user-friendly filename matching with these
> technical differences that users mostly don't care about"... wouldn't
> you say "do it in the GUI facilities, changing the FS to handle this
> is wrong because it will break the OS as a server, as a reliable file
> storage"?

Sure, but you have to remember, HFS+ was developed back for Mac OS 8,  
which really wasn't a very good server machine.

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> FSs have pretty hard requirements these days -- all the modern FS
> you've heard about respect the requirement above, and a ton more that
> you have to be in the FS business to be aware of. Mostly anyway,
> wherever they don't, users have all sorts of trouble.
>
>> IIRC, the biggest problem he talked about was the changing unicode  
>> standard,
>> but since the technote appears to state that HFS+ will not be  
>> changing its
>> normalization algorithms to preserve backwards compatibility with  
>> existing
>> volumes, that doesn't appear to be a nasty issue after all. Is  
>> there another
>> issue I've failed to address in this thread?
>
> Well, Ted answered that part, noting that then the "normalisation" is
> patchy, and everyone else is left to guess what chars are normalised
> and what chars aren't so being HFS+ compatible becomes a very weird
> game indeed. You didn't reply to his explanation -- you called him
> arrogant instead. Did you manage to read to the end if his email?

I've read every single email in this thread, all the way through. Ted  
was arguing against calling it "normalization". If you want to argue  
that it's using a non-standard normal form, go ahead, but surely you  
can figure out that can you simply re-normalize it to whatever form  
you want.

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> The HFS+ designers mucked it up -- and then papered over it with the
> OSX libraries. But a good chunk of the world does not use them, they
> forgot about the little "interop" requirement.

Sure, maybe they did forget about interop. Or maybe they developed  
this back on Mac OS 8 where the only real competitor was Windows, and  
they didn't have to worry about the Mac being used as an NFS server,  
and thus interop wasn't even a requirement.

-Kevin Ballard

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@sb.org
http://www.tildesoft.com