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

On 8/27/06, Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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.


Ryan,

With all due respect, I beg to differ. Look at the two excerpts I have
copied and pasted from the Apple Knowledge Base below from the Knowledge
Base article titled "Mac OS X Choosing UFS or Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus)
formatting" ...

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25316

Unless you have a specific reason to use UFS, you should use the Mac OS
> Extended and Mac OS Extended Journaled format since it provides a more
> familiar experience to Macintosh users.
>

and

*UFS With UNIX*
> UFS may be preferable for developing UNIX-based applications within Mac OS
> X.
>

Ryan, I would rate the small group of DarwinPorts community users as a group
of UNIX developers that prefer the Darwin platform implemented as Mac OS X.
In some situations (my case for example), I really don't care about user
familiarity because I'm working on the server side for development and
deployment of applications that a user will mostly have to access through
standard protocols such as HTTP, IMAP, LDAP, etc. This is what I happen to
mostly use MacPorts / DarwinPorts for. Apple in no way is asserting that UFS
is not recommended for all contexts. I bet if you look around and ask people
who are deploying server side applications with WebObjects for example, they
probably have quite a few deployments that are on UFS rather than HFS+ (and
maybe some HFSX).

If Apple thought that using UFS was detrimental and dangerous than they
would deprecate it with Tiger or Leopard. But notice that is not happening
(nor is Apple moving yet to more advanced file systems ZFS as far as we can
publicly determine < http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/8/15/4995
>).

Sorry, but you are incorrect to state that UFS is not recommended in all
contexts. The world is not black or white, it is shades of grey (color
spectrum actually).


> 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.


The market dictates lot of things thank goodness, so Apple has to adapt. The
reality is that the world is mixed and not homogeneous (although one could
argue that its still very much Windows monopolistic and therefore mostly
homogeneous). How do you have the audacity to think that Apple is in the
driver's seat when it is by far the underdog in the PC and laptop markets
worldwide?

Of course Apple will sell more Intel Macs when their customers will have the
psychological comfort knowing they can run Windows if they want to. Apple
really didn't have a choice in this regard but they have spun good marketing
to make it look like they were giving their customers a gift by saying "here
is Boot Camp" which will be included as standard in Leopard.


They provide no support for this however.


Not yet since Boot Camp is still Beta but when it becomes part of Leopard
they sure will.


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.


In a free marketplace, why would Apple's recommendation matter?

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.


Ryan, this is not possible. HFS+ is a closed source proprietary file system.
This means that the producers of another OS  and not produce their own
drivers for HFS+ since there is no full transparency.


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.



But the world is not as simple as that. Do not forget that Apple iPods when
used for machines running Windows XP have to be formatted with FAT32 (or is
it NTFS?).

IMHO your views about the file systems in a dynamic world where global
market forces shape the world are somewhat naive, no personal offense
intended.

I will continue my pursuit of building MacPorts on UFS regardless of what
anyone else thinks. There is no harm in doing so and it can only help the
collective knowledge of the MacPorts community.

Best regards,

T.