Re: MS-DOS FST?

[aa382@Freenet.carleton.ca (Marc Sira)]

In a previous article, vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry) says:

>Jim Murphy <murph@apple.com> writes:
>
>>     Excuse me, but that's a rather baseless and ignorant statement. Just
>>because you don't understand how they work or how to implement them
>>doesn't mean they are useless. Resources have a myriad of uses, as others
>>have pointed out.
>
>It seems I'm outnumbered by a lot, but that doesn't change my opinion of
>resources. I have yet to hear a good reason to use resources.

The only real downside to them is lack of P8 support. It'd be nice to have
P8 able to read at least the data fork of an extended file. Things like Teach
files have useful data forks, and it's occasionally frustrating not to be able
to get at the data in a file whose only resource is an rversion. I suppose the
worry is that someone attempting to copy such a file with an older P8 utility
would then lose the resource fork, but not be informed that the copy had
failed.
Another alternative might be for P8 to be able to read the resource fork as
a block (making no attempt to interpret the individual resources). This way
you could copy a file, etc, from a P8 program without losing anything. I
imagine this would be difficult though, and require a fair amount of special
casing...you'd probably still have a problem with older software as well. Oh
well.

All that said, I think the benefits of using resources outweigh the
drawback(s). :)
-- 
Marc Sira                  |
aa382@freenet.carleton.ca  |  "Your god drinks...p-p-peach nectar."
toh@micor.ocunix.on.ca     '