Re: [boost] Re: [filesystem] new functions proposals

From: Edouard Poor (edouard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-04-22 04:51:05

On Sat, 2003-04-19 at 00:59, Neal D. Becker wrote:
> Slightly OT, but can anyone give me a hint what these alternate
streams are 
> intended for?  Is this an attempt to recommit something like the apple
> data/resource fork?

It allowed them to support running an Apple Share server from an NT box
way back in the day with very little effort.

With XP, Microsoft has started to put data in there in a more Apple
style -- for example the meta data about MP3s is stored in an alternate
stream I believe. I suspect you'll see more of that in future OS's from
MS.

> There once was a time when people thought it would be a Good Thing
(tm) to get 
> their OS to recognize different properties of files.  Thus, VMS was
created.  
> In some theoretical sense, it probably was good. 

In an actual sense it great under the early Mac OS's. A lot of the
normal tedious work about having structured data associated with files
and programs simply didn't exist.

Cheers,
Edouard.