Linus Torvalds calls OS X's file-system "utter crap" | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds calls OS X's file-system "utter crap"

theage.com.au

20 pointsnreece14 comments

Uh, that's not quite the whole quote...

> "I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," he said. "(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."

Good catch. What an annoying, attention seeking, karma whoring title. What's next, 100 Ron Paul stories? :(

yes the file system is a worry. But that headline is totally wrong.

What's wrong with the file system?

HFS has some cruft from pre-Unix implementations. However, this cruft allows you use the filing system on older versions of MocOS. HFS implements swap space as a hidden file. HFS+ implements journalling in same way. If you boot an older version of MocOS then you temporarily lose journalling. This is the behaviour that you'd want. However, some bits are messy, including directory seperators, Unicode file names, file forks and instant indexing of file names.

There was talk of ZFS for a while I think?

I guess it will be post leopard now.

ZFS is an alpha-quality optional add-on in Leopard; I guess most users won't see it until later.

last time I heard, ZFS was going to be supported in the server version first.

Thanks for the explanation.

The layout, the naming.

That's the most uninteresting of things he said. The real value of the article were his thoughts on hardware vs software cost.

Every hardware manufacturer must LOVE Linux for its own sake. And not just Asians, I would add. Ultimately, if DELL wants to make more money off each PC, they should switch to Linux. And now just vanilla distro, but their own unique flavor, with their own open source drivers for some unique hardware, similar to Apple's multi-touch. Right now that extra "software money" allowed per-PC is spent on Microsoft licenses.

Software is the king. Our startup (hardware + software) recently got acquired precisely because of our small software team - the other 80% of the company (hardware) wasn't of much value to the acquirer.

if the title's quote was what Torvalds actually said, this would be the funniest news post of the week

Tosser

He sort of bends the question like Hillary. He first puts down his competition, then curves the question back to his own product allowing himself to do some nice PR work for free.

He's just looking out for his best interests.

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