[KLUG Members] Difference

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >Ever seen a UNIX that uses resource forks like a Mac does?  Forks are
> >very much anti traditional-UNIX-paradigm.
> true, the forks are really weird. What's the purpose for them, anyways? 

They let you store multiple streams of data in the same file.  One fork
can be content and another data,  or each fork can represent another
version of the content.  They are actually really useful and this is
something that Mac did right.  

Instead of relying on something flakey like .xxx file extensions, just
right the actuall mime type of the file into a meta-data fork.  Makes
application integration a whole lot easier.

Or think about using nautilus, where you can pick "notes" and enter any
text you want.  In Linux now, if you move that file, etc... you loose
your notes.  It is actually just glued together with some hidden XML
file in the directory.  The same with emblems, etc....  If Linux
supported forks this information could be written to the file itself and
they would then follow that file wherever it went, and not disturb the
data content of the file.  Security and authentication information could
also be recorded in forks,  making a file unreadable by anyone not
possessing a specific Kerberos V principle, etc...

Or every time you save a file it could perform automatic version control
by saving the previous version in another fork; mainframes frequently do
exactly this to permit auditting.

> any other OS I've used doesn't use forks, but they do fine (besides 
> windows, of course)

NTFS supports forks,  only Win32 doesn't really use them yet (M$-Office
does in some cases).  The rumor is that come
blackbird/longhorn/secret-name-of-the-week Win32 will depend upon fork
to a large extend;  notice that the Samba people are pressing to
completely implement fork support soon.  I've been told that the mail
store for recent versions of Exchange use forks as well.