[G4] defraging a Mac

[Doug McNutt]

At 11:36 -0400 4/5/04, Alex wrote:
>   "Future Support for Named Forks
>
>    . . . .yet, but the goal is to provide an arbitrary number of forks,
>    identified by Unicode names, for any file or directory."

Before Next Step became Apple's property there were Copeland and Gershwin, code names for the systems to follow OS 8.  The second one planned would have supported multiple resource forks and there was probably code and documentation under development when OS 9 was released.

OS neXt uses packages which are really directories treated specially by Finder so that "users" aren't aware of the content files without directed effort. They are common in other operating systems - *nix - and serve much the same purpose as forks.

My guess (and that's dangerous!) is that references to multiple forks are remnants of older directions at Apple and that the real plan is to entirely do away with forks in favor of packages and cross-platform compatibility.

A real question is whether or not neXt disk management attempts to keep files within a package together on the platters. I don't think HFS+ knows anything about packages.

-- 
--> Marriage and kilo are troubled words. Turmoil results when centuries-old usage is altered in specialized jargon <--.