dlyons@Apple.COM (David Lyons) (09/15/89)
In article <11055@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: >[...] >Apple failed to inform us in advance of the change in file naming; >if they'd stuck with / separators instead of switching to : for >general FST use, assuming the FSTs are doing their job existing >programs would have already supported them. GS/OS separator handling has been documented ever since the first APDA draft of the GS/OS reference. Actually, a lot of programs *do* work with AppleShare under GS/OS, even if they were written in the ProDOS 16 days. I bet a lot of them will work fine with any future FSTs, too. Anything that uses Standard File is in pretty good shape, file-system-independence-wise. >The whole POINT of FSTs >is to provide a uniform application interface to a variety of file >system types. Applications are not supposed to have to do ANYthing >to "keep in mind" any particular FST. I agree--and they do a pretty good job. The problem is that lots of GS/OS programmers come from a ProDOS 8 & ProDOS 16 background, and they have to weed out all the old assumptions from their thinking-- limited character sets, 15-character-max filenames, being able to read block 2 and get various information about a ProDOS volume, etc. (There's a GS/OS Technical Note pointing out things not to assume.) Here's an example of a case where an application probably deserves more help from FSTs than it can currently get. The user wants to copy a folder from AppleShare to ProDOS. ProDOS has stricter naming requirements, so it's possible for the folder or some of its contents to have names that aren't valid in the target file system. So what does the app do when it gets error $40 (invalid pathname syntax) from a Create call? It probably (1) prompts the user for a good filename or (2) invents a good name using rules for specific file systems, or some combination of those. Are there systems out there that deal with this sort of problem nicely? -- --Dave Lyons, Apple Computer, Inc. | DAL Systems AppleLink--Apple Edition: DAVE.LYONS | P.O. Box 875 AppleLink--Personal Edition: Dave Lyons | Cupertino, CA 95015-0875 GEnie: D.LYONS2 or DAVE.LYONS CompuServe: 72177,3233 Internet/BITNET: dlyons@apple.com UUCP: ...!ames!apple!dlyons My opinions are my own, not Apple's.