Stan writes:

>How about FTP, which knows (because you told it) whether the file
>is to be treated as ASCII or BINARY?

FTP can get this behavior for free, if the POSIX library and/or the file
system support Gavin's flags. This would certainly be nice.

My point was just that a file server program (e.g., Samba) can't really
make use of the flags when it's reading a file on behalf of a client,
because of the risk of data corruption. Unlike FTP, which is operated by
someone who knows that a file transfer is taking place, a server may be
hidden behind several layers. There is no margin for error, as there is
with FTP. (One web site I maintain on a remote Unix box that's
NFS-mounted on our Unix box, then exported via AppleShare. That's two
layers of file server protocols, plus three file system layers.)

Also, there's no provision in any file server protocol with which I'm
familiar (SMB, NFS, and AFP) for a client to specify a translation
option, so there's no way for the client to say, "no, really, don't
translate this file even if you think you should."

Gavin's idea for a set of flags to indicate the preferred line
termination for the file is clearly a good one, since it will solve the
DOS-to-MPE translation problem. But there isn't a safe way to solve all
MPE-to-external problems. Incidentally, when SMB serves a plain MPE file,
it should be able to look at the FOPTIONs and make an appropriate and
safe translation, thanks to the fact that MPE stores a lot more
descriptive information about a file than does the POSIX world.

-- Bruce


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