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Easily create HFS-aware PKZIP and unix archives
Authored by: SOX on Nov 26, '03 03:08:40PM
Not an answer to your question but... Microsoft's longhorn and several Gnu projects are moving in the direction of even more meta data since the user experience will be a file system accessed via data base not a folder hierachy.

The mac metadata and reousrce forks serve distinct rolls. The meta data allows one to know what program created or shoul dopen a file without having to reply on the name extention convention. It also can indicate other things like the fact that the file is a HFS alias (as opposed to a unix link).

the resource fork was a neccessary item to assure programs and documents could carry around auxilirary information without having to have multple files. In Mac OSX this is replaced with an equally arbitrary solution. One can create a folder that contains multiple files that all pertain to the document or application. For example the applications now all are designated by the arbitrary addition of .app to their folder name. In the finder they appear as atomic entity rather than as a folder you can (easily) open. What's arbirtary here is the follwoing. When you double click the icon how does the finder know what to do? well it looks inside the folder for a file that obeys a certain naming convention. When you look at the file in the finder how does it know what icon to use? Well again inside the folder a naming convetion is used to tell the finder which is the icon. How do applications egister services with the OS. You got it....

the resource fork was just a different solution to this problem that worked fine. The problem was not that mac made a bad choice, rather the problem was that EVERYONE else (unix, DOS) made a bad choice by not creating a rich enough specification for how to do accomplish all these needs when applications require auxilirary files and yet how to keep the application as an atomic entity. Thus the macs had a hard time mapping their scheme onto these weakling file systems. This was the source of this headache.

the headache recurs now mainly as a legacy; pure osx files only have meta data but not resource forks. In the future I expect we may see more meta data but lose the resource forks.

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