Re: ProDOS Plus revisited

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:

> Ok, so the HFS FST on GS/OS will allow the use of
> gigabyte sized hard drives and larger as single partitions.
> 
> However, there was some talk in trying to update the
> ProDOS FST to use volumes larger than 32MB
> because ProDOS has some advantages, such as
> speed.  But any changes would break ProDOS.

Yes, that was a good discussion.  It certainly made me think about the
issues again.

> How about not changing it at all.  How about an INIT
> or Finder extension or something that would create
> a VIRTUAL partition, then take each ProDOS volume
> on a partitioned hard disk and show them as FOLDERS?

So your proposed change only affects the way Finder displays things,
then?

It wouldn't help with ProDOS-8, since P8 cannot possibly access more
than 14 volumes at the same time (and several are used up by RAM disks
and other drives).  A utility to select between active partitions could
get around this (already built into the RAMFast).

It wouldn't help much with user interfaces other than Finder, e.g.
Standard File, but this already looks pretty much like your suggestion
anyway (the desktop is treated as a folder containing all mounted
volumes).  Text-based systems like GNO or ORCA/Shell would reveal the
full nightmare, but it would be reasonably manageable.

Unless you did some major patches to Finder, each volume would still be
treated as a separate volume for many issues such as Desktop files (and
related paraphenalia), and for rules about how an icon drag behaves
within and across volumes (copy vs move).

It doesn't get around the artificial division imposed by having a huge
number of relatively tiny partitions.  I want to be able to keep
accumulating files in a particular folder, and not have to worry about a
volume getting full and having to start using another volume.  It makes
all sorts of operations such as organising and finding files more
complicated.

Another problem: Advanced Disk Utility cannot create that many
partitions.  It is difficult getting it to set up more than eight, and
it imposes a hard limit based on the physical size of the drive: no more
than 8 partitions for any drive size up to 256 MB, increasing by one for
each additional 32 MB, to a limit of 32 partitions for a 1GB or larger
drive.

> This is not as crazy as it seems.  The drawback to
> having, for example, 40 partition icons on the
> desktop (for those with large hard drives but refuse
> to use the HFS FST) is that it clutters.

40 partitions, each 32 MB is somewhat over 1 GB.  You would not be able
to use this method with a 2 GB or larger drive, because GS/OS only
allows each driver to provide 63 logical volumes over _all_ devices it
supports.  This means that if your partition size is limited to 32 MB,
you cannot possibly access more than 2016 MB, short of having multiple
device drivers that share access to the appropriate volumes.

(ADU wouldn't let you create more than 32 partitions anyway, so it would
have to be patched or another utility used, and no such utility exists
on the Apple II, as far as I know.)

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand