Re: Implementing Meta File information in Linux

Michael Nelson (mikenel@iapetus.com)
Wed, 2 Sep 1998 11:48:02 -0400 (EDT)


I am not picking sides here... but I believe that in NT 5.0 the OLE Native
Structured Storage extensions to NTFS will take advantage of NTFS's
multiple stream (a.k.a. fork) support. Structured storage on NT 4.0,
Win95, et. al. is sort of a "file system in a file"; with NSS, they can do
this more efficiently.

MS Office is probably the most significant consumer of structured storage
as all of the apps in the suite use it for their file formats.

-mike

On Wed, 2 Sep 1998, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> From: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>
> Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 22:41:26 -0400 (EDT)
>
> /home/bob is a Windows share, mounted from an NT server.
> Bob does "cp foo bar" to make a copy of his file.
> That file has:
> * ACLs
> * multiple forks
> * extended attributes
> * several gigabytes of data
> * holes (compression)
>
> NTFS does have support for multiple streams, but nothing actually uses
> it except for the Appleshare server. When I talked to a developer at
> Microsoft and pointed out the problems with multiple fork files,
> especially as they relate to shipping them over the Internet using ftp,
> et. al, he responded that it was only the Appleshare server on NT that
> used it, and as far as he knew, there were no plans for MS Office or any
> other MS applications to actually *use* multiple forks.
>
> So it sounds like Microsoft has avoided making the same mistakes as
> Apple did. Hopefully we can also manage to avoid making the same
> mistake.
>
> Repeat after me, ten times slowly: Multiple fork files are a bad idea.
>
> - Ted
>
> -
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