Re: experiment to get Mac resource-forks under version control [with PATCH]

On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 09:18:00AM +0200, Julian Reschke wrote:
> > From: Nicholas Riley [mailto:njriley@uiuc.edu]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 8:51 AM
> > To: Scott Collins
> > Cc: dev@subversion.tigris.org
> > Subject: Re: experiment to get Mac resource-forks under version control
> > [with PATCH]
> >
> >
> > ...
> >
> > I feel the same way, FWIW. We need more metadata, not less. If it
> > has to be implemented in a not-so-nice way on foreign filesystems, so
> > be it. Other Unixes and Windows are moving towards extended
> > attributes in -their- native filesystems (in the case of NTFS, it
> > already exists), which Subversion will need to support eventually - so
> > it won't be a permanent discontinuity. And the fact is, simply, that
> > many components written since the release of OS X use resource forks
> > for metadata. The "all the world's UFS" mentality is backwards-thinking.
>
> That being said -- if you *really* want to put Mac resource forks into
> properties, you should probably extract all properties from the resource
> fork and treat each one as a *separate* DAV/SVN property. That way
> non-Mac-specific clients could take advantage of it as well (as far as I
> remember each one has a 4-ASCII-letter code, so you could easily map them to
> custom properties in a "Mac resource fork" namespace).

I would wager that every potential user of a resource fork is aware
that he's limiting his audience to Mac users, and doesn't mind it
being treated as an indivisible unit within Subversion. It would be
possible to devise a resource-to-property-namespace encoding, but not
a lot of fun. Resources are identified by a unique type (a 4-byte
quantity usually represented as a 4-letter code) and 32-bit ID, but
resources themselves have metadata such as names and flags. I don't
think we want to drag the properties-of-properties debate into this
one :-)

-- 
=Nicholas Riley <njriley_at_uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>
        Pablo Research Group, Department of Computer Science and
  Medical Scholars Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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