🚀 go-pugleaf

While staying very firmly on the side of supporting the old ROMs, I'd like
to say that I wish very much it were not so.  There are simply too many
configuration options now, two large dimensions of choice.  When doing file
operations, you have to ask, first, is this machine running HFS or MFS?
Then you have to ask, is this volume that I'm working on an HFS or an MFS
volume?  Finally, you have to ask whether this machine has old or new ROMs
(an old ROM machine could be running RAM-based HFS, after all.)  Yeccchh!
That's an awful lot of special cases to have to put into your code.
Increases in code complexity tend to be correlated with decreases in code
readability and therefore maintainability.

I would like to see Apple declare MFS and MFS volumes obsolete and do a real
upgrade of the operating system, one where you can do things the right way
without having to include the wrong way in a special case.  The MFS disk
format could still be supported, with some overhead for interpreting its
DeskTop-resource folders as HFS directories.  Of course Apple will not do
this, because in terms of profit per unit it doesn't pay.  And after all,
it's not like they have enough money in the bank to be able to afford to do
something purely for something unimportant like developer relations or
improved reliability :-)

But if bitching made it so, then I would have saved the world by now....
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)