Re: DarwinPorts (MacPorts) Advisory: Stay with at least Xcode 2.2.1 on Intel (if not PPC)

On Aug 27, 2006, at 13:25, Emmanuel Hainry wrote:

> hfs with case sensitivity appeared with tiger. I remember that when
> upgrading from panther, I chose to use this option. Funnily, OSX  
> did not
> support it very well and some programs were having strange  
> behaviour. So
> I came back to hfs+, and another partition in ufs for sharing with
> netBSD and installing things requiring Case sensitivity (pkgsrc for
> example).

Case-sensitive HFS+ appeared in Mac OS X Server 10.3.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107863

That article also states that case-sensitive HFS+ should not be used  
for boot volumes, only for data volumes. It also states that case- 
sensitive HFS+ performs better than UFS.


>> Also, HFS+ does not support sparse files (Darwin UFS does!) and if  
>> you look
>> at Apple's evolution of the Disk Utility app, you can see how  
>> sparse files
>> and disc images have come along as a new option when imaging the file
>> system.
>>
>> I am most certain that Jordan K. Hubbard can shed more light on  
>> Darwin UFS
>> and if it was no longer needed then why is it that Leopard is not  
>> going to
>> kill off UFS?
>>
>> My view of this is that HFS, being closed and proprietary, is  
>> somewhat of an
>> anomaly and NeXT merging with Apple decided to keep HFS for the  
>> sake of
>> transitioning people from legacy Apple file systems (Mac OS 8, OS 9)
>> to OS X.

I believe Apple decided to keep HFS+ because it works just fine, is  
what everybody is already using, and furthermore it supports things  
that Macs like to do which UFS doesn't have. (Consider multi-fork  
files.) IMHO, UFS was made available on Mac OS X simply because NeXT  
had it and there was no point in removing functionality. But its use  
is certainly not recommended. Just search the knowledge base for  
"UFS" to see all the problems its use can cause.


> I would not say anomaly, but in my mind, hfs[+x] is comparable with
> ntfs. A particular system prefers to be installed on such a fs, but no
> other system really support it. And it seems Apple is in favour of
> people having multiple OSes on their machines, so either Apple should
> implement drivers for hfs for other systems, either continue  
> supporting
> ufs.

What gives you the impression that Apple wants people to install  
multiple OSes? I always get the impression that Apple wants people to  
run Mac OS X only. The fact that you can now run Windows also should  
not be taken as any indication that Apple wants you to do this;  
rather, I believe Apple observed that users wanted to do this, and so  
made it possible. They provide no support for this however. And I  
don't think Windows can boot from UFS either (though I'm no expert on  
Windows). And nowhere have I ever seen any indication that Apple  
recommends you to run Linux or FreeBSD on Mac hardware either.  
Finally, it is not Apple's responsibility to provide HFS+ drivers for  
any other operating system. If the makers of that other operating  
system want to offer such drivers, then they should do so, but I  
don't see any compelling reason for Apple to invest any engineering  
resources into this. Mac OS X, the operating system Apple wants you  
to use, already supports HFS+, so if I were Apple, that's as far as I  
would go.