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From: geff@iastate.edu (Geff Underwood)
Subject: Mac file types
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.171020.5088@news.iastate.edu>
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: none for me, thanks, I'm trying to cut down
References: <1991Jun22.045446.2732@Sugar.NeoSoft.com> <102@ryptyde.UUCP> <25668@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1991 17:10:20 GMT
Lines: 46

In article <25668@well.sf.ca.us> farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) writes:
>dant@ryptyde.UUCP (Daniel Tracy) writes:
>
>>You stated that the file type of a Macintosh file was kept in the
>>resource fork. It isn't.
>
>Where is it kept, then?  Last time *I* looked, file types were definitely
>resources, and thus *had* to be in the resource fork.  Has this changed
>in 7.0?  If so, why doesn't EVERYTHING break?

You should have looked more closely.  The file owner/type information is
part of the directory structure, and always has been.  A Macintosh file
can have a zero-byte resource fork, and a zero-byte data fork, but it will
still have the full owner/type information.  Perhaps you were confused by
the fact that some file types have the same names as some resources.

>>Our bitmap, drawing, text, formatted text, movie, sound, etc.
>>don't need resources, although they can be transfered into one (some of
>>them).
>
>Hmm?  Many of those ARE resources, kept in the resource fork.  Are you
>saying this is not so?  If so, what about those that are?

They CAN BE resources, kept in the resource fork.  Not at all the same
thing.  They often are stored that way, so that standard tools can extract
or replace them.

>>You can just as easily use them on other machines.
>
>Yeah, so?  You have to go through hoops to do so.  I did the Amiga version
>of Crystal Quest, and one of the biggest pains in the butt of the entire
>conversion was pulling the data out of the resources and converting it
>into some usable format on the Ami.  Just how many machines, pray tell,
>can handle PICT resources directly?

PICT?  You need Mac ROMs to use that format, because a PICT image is a
sequence of QuickDraw calls.  This has nothing to do with the file system,
and is true whether the image was stored as a PICT resource or as the data
fork of a PICT file.

>-- 
>Mike Farren 				     farren@well.sf.ca.us

--
Geff Underwood
geff@iastate.edu
