HFS+

[Tim Seufert]

On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 02:09  PM, nathan r. hruby wrote:

> My point was that hopefully now that the machines are physically 
> limited
> to not booting OS9 (and as we know, Carbon File Mangaer works), that
> perhaps we'll see some venturing of filesystems in Panther.

I doubt they will venture to other filesystems.  Why wouldn't they just 
continue to evolve HFS+, as they already have by adding journalling?  
It is actually a reasonably good FS.  It does some things better than 
traditional UNIX-ish filesystems, such as support for international 
characters in filenames, and fast searches (due to its B*Tree 
directories).  It does some things worse or different, such as hard and 
softlinks (these must be emulated as HFS+ is not an inode FS) and case 
semantics.

It's probably a better choice overall for Apple's customer base.  For 
example, case preserving but case insensitive is almost certainly the 
best choice for non-technical computer users, who don't usually 
instinctively understand why the computer might think a file named 
"readme.txt" is different from a file named "Readme.txt".

Getting back to the original question, would I want to run Linux on it? 
  No, it'd probably involve a great deal of pain auditing a whole distro 
for files whose names differ only by case, and Linux doesn't have the 
infrastructure outside the kernel to take advantage of any of the extra 
features HFS+ supports.  Could it be done?  I don't see why not, so 
long as the Linux HFS+ FS driver is sufficiently full featured.