Does anyone still need to create legacy HFS filesystems?

[Joel Rees]

Think MOL? I've never used it, but I would hate to block its use on
Fedora. I'm planning to use it someday.

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 3:12 AM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2012, at 6:45 PM, John Reiser wrote:
>
>>> Does anyone object [to dropping support for HFS]?
>>
>> Plain HFS has no journal, so there are workloads where HFS is faster
>> than HFS+ which has a journal.
>
> Mac OS Extended or HFS+ or HFS Plus, does not inherently have a journal. There is a separate variant called Journaled HFS+ (acronym appears as HFSJ or jhfs+). There is yet another variant called HFSX which is case-sensitive, but also has more feature potential than HFSJ.
>
> For nearly nine years Apple's tools have only created HFSJ/jhfs+ by default.

Most of the reason for supporting HFS at all lies in seriously old
legacy software. Much older than nine years.

>>  Is it economical to cater to such cases?
>> Probably not.

retro computing? Maintaining access to pre-historic data?

(I keep thinking I want to get MOL or an equivalent emulator running
on a Linus box so I can dump my ancient 68K macs like my wife wants me
to. There's a sentimental resistance to dumping those boxes, but I
haven't booted either in over a year, I think. Wait. I played around
with an old Codewarrior compiler on one last summer. Heh.)

>> [...]
> HFS is dead. I'm not even finding a partition type GUID for it, it was always intended to be used with the APM partitioning scheme (not MDB or GPT).

Well, yeah, the partition type was a kind of half-baked attempt to
help DOS-world OSses ignore Mac disks. I don't remember the flag
number and I couldn't find it last time I looked, either. I think it
got re-used by something more meaningful in the DOS-world.

But, no, HFS isn't really dead. Old formats should not be allowed to
die. I do want to be able to read my old media under emulation
someday. Apple doesn't care, but I do.

Sentimental fool that I am. :-/

--
Joel Rees