Re: can dar handle Mac resource forks

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Paul Tremblay wrote:
| On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 10:30:10PM +0100, Denis Corbin wrote:
|
|>Paul Tremblay wrote:
|[...]
|>
|>By the way, have you succeeded running dar under Macintosh ?
|
|
|
|>macOS X is a Unix like system and does not seems to use file forks, am I
|>wrong ?
|
|
| mac OS X still uses resource forks. For example, the quicken program,
| quite popular, uses them, and without them will not work. I also think
| MS word uses them. However, unlike quicken, MS Word will work without
| resource forks.

I was not aware that mac OS X does uses resource forks too. It is often
said to be a real unix system... by extension over the kernel part, it
is easy to assume a standard unix filesystem is used too.

|
| Yes, resource forks are unique to the Macintosh file system. Eventually,
| Macintosh plans to phase them out, but in the mean time they are quite
| crucial. While *most* files will get restored without resource forks, a
| small percentage will not.
|
| Frankly, these resource forks are a pain in the neck. I don't fault dar
| in any way for not handling them.  However, you might want to post a
| message somewhere letting users know that dar cannot properly back up a
| Macintosh file system. Even knowledgable people don't know about
| resource forks, and might be under the mistaken assumption that they
| have backed up their data with dar.

I was not aware about file forks until your mail. So I will add a note
about that (where is the most appropriate ? README + website ?).

| For example, in November someone
| posted a message to this mailing list saying that they had compiled dar
| under Panther. I wonder if that poster is aware of the resource forks
| problem?

I don't know at all.

|
|
|
|>|
|>| If these resource forks do not get copied to the archive many files
|>will be useless.
|>|
|>
|>yes, in particular executable files.
|>
|>
|>| Also, I was wondering about how dar handles compression. My impression
|>is that one
|>| should
|>| not use compression when using an archiver like tar, since one little
|>bit of corruption
|>| in the
|>| archive, and the whole archive is useless. Other archivers like afio
|>handle compression
|>| much
|>| better and are considered safe to use.
|>
|>you can find a detailed explaination here:
|>http://dar.linux.free.fr/#feat
|>reading the "compression","direct access" and "Archive Testing" paragraphs
|
|
| Thanks. I'll check this out. I have not suceeded yet in compiling dar
| under Mac OS X. I tried compiling it under system 10.2 (as opposed to
| 10.3), and had a little better luck, but the configuration process
| stopped when it couldn't find the bzlib. I found a copy of the bzlib on
| fink (a repository for Mac OS X software),

You can try the version 2.2.0 which is actually in pre-release, the
libbz2 library dependency is no more mandatory.

| but hadn't gotten around to
| downloading it. At this point, I probably won't try to compile dar for
| Mac since it won't handle resource forks. I'll contnuing using hfspax, a
| variant of pax which does handle them.

sure !

|
| Thanks for your response.

You are welcome.

|
| Paul
|

Cheers,
Denis.
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