Subject: Re: Apple Double?
From: Philip Bertuglia (pbertugl@wheatonma.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 08:01:19 EDT
I agree 100%!
But, what do you do when you upgrade from an older version of afpd and the
new afpd can NOT pars the old .ApppleDouble files? The answer, because what
you said about the .AppleDouble files is correct, your basicaly stuck
running the old binary until you figure out how to convert the old files.
This is not easy to do on a production box.
This Monday, the older netatalk package I was running on a Linux 2.2.13
kernel quit on me. Client Macs would totally lock up when trying to
authenticate. The latest version on netatalk had no problems with
authentication but the obove problem persisted. Being under the gun like I
was, I figured out how to convert these old .AppleDouble files quickly and
with very little down time. If you need this procedure please ask me for it.
At 05:58 PM 4/7/00 +0800, Joerg Bullmann wrote:
>Hi Bill and all,
>
>My god, I half got a heart attack reading this
>thread!!!!!! Guys, be very very careful!
>
> DO NOT DELETE .APPLEDOUBLE STUFF
>
>It is totally up to the applications what they
>store in the resource fork (RF) and what in the
>data fork (DF). And the RF is stored in .AppleDouble
>files.
>
>Bill, you are lucky that you only "cleaned up"
>HTML's, JPG's, and a few GIF's. In those files,
>usually nothing "important" is stored in the RF.
>In text files you e.g. have the scroll and cursor
>position. Photoshop adds custom icons (thumbnail
>pix) and stuff like that.
>
>But there are files that contain almost all their
>contents or big parts it in the RF. Had it been
>files like that, you would have been stuck
>with mutilated and useless file carcasses. ;-|
>Applications for example totally break if you
>remove their R.
>
>Look at it a bit like this; "I'll truncate all
>files I have to multiples of 4096 so they fill
>my hard disk more efficiently". You wouldn't do
>that either.
>
>I would recommend to not touch, change or remove
>the .AppleDouble pendants of the files on netatalk
>volumes. Resource data is "data" as well and noone
>should assume it is redundant stuff.
>
>Admittedly there are situations, where you want to
>clean up stuff and dance with the big broom through
>parts of your file systems. Do it with utmost care
>though. TEXT, GIF, JPEG, and file formats that "live"
>on the web (i.e. can be viewed directly through web
>browsers) are usually safe, because browsers and
>web servers don't know RF's.
>
>In any case, do some testing first!
>
>In general developers tend to move away from storing
>stuff in the RF, probably for cross platform compati-
>bility reasons (e.g. Macromedia's Dreamweaver project
>files can be directly interchanged between Windows
>and Mac; they only could this get this to work by
>not using the Mac's RF because there are no RF's in
>Windows). But I wouldn't let this tendency make me
>go careless...
>
>I hope I didn't miss anything, and I also didn't
>want to sound LOUD. But we're talking really
>dangerous stuff here, and I haven't read anything
>in this thread that made my point explicitly enough:
>
> *GENERAL* rule is not that you *should*
> keep the RF of the files but that you
> *MUST KEEP IT*.
>
>Others please correct me. It might be a bit on the
>dogmatic side, but I hope this saves the odd hour
>restoring broken files... ;-)
>
>Joerg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Wed Jan 17 2001 - 14:30:25 EST