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Re: MS-DOS FST? => Resources
In article <C69o93.Jqw@news.iastate.edu> irsman@iastate.edu (Ian Schmidt) writes:
>In article <1rp75k$dni@altitude.HIP.CAM.ORG> vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry) writes:
>>Not that resources should exist in the first place.. nothing but problems,
>>a stupid idea from Apple.
>Like hell. Resources are THE coolest thing Apple's come out with, excepting
>the IIgs itself. They're the only way to go for easy GUI design, and they're
>damn handy for including a program and all its data in 1 easy file.
> Ian Schmidt: irsman@iastate.edu
The concept of resources is great - having data separate from the code
and being able to edit it at a later date without the need for the source.
It makes GUI design potentially much easier, and it allows customisation
of programs for your individual taste and international distribution.
Unfortunately, the implementation Apple chose (ie: splitting a file into
two forks) sucks badly, IMHO.
It required adding a vast array of support at the operating system level,
and makes Apple's proprietory file systems very difficult to map to any
other file systems (such as MSDOS, UNIX, etc).
Why couldn't they just define a file format for executeables that allowed
"resources" to be included in the same "fork" as the program, with the
code being in uniquely identified "resource"?
We don't really need resource on files that are not executeable code,
do we?
If it is really necessary to add comments to files, then this functionality
could be added in variable length directory entries.
This would then just become an attribute of the file - and it was already
true that not all file systems support all attributes.
I would think that such an implementation would create far less problems.
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