A/UX gripe

[Forrest E. Lumpkin]

Last week I wrote:

>1) Will A/UX 2.0.1 resolve the problem( undocumented feature:-) )
>   of only one Mac partition per physical device (hard drive)?

To which Kent Sandvik replied:

>Well, the trick with patching _HFSDispatch in order to fake multiple
>HFS volumes on one single volume has always been a hack, and thus
>is not suppored by neither A/UX or MacOS.

To which Alexis Rosen replied:

>Please. It works. Thousands of people use it, and you should support it.
>No debate is permissible on this subject. :-)

I also wrote:

>2) Will the bugs in the installation software be resolved. With the present
>   software intelligent use of dp is required unless one is setting up
>   a one A/UX partition (/) hard disk arrangement?

To which Kent Sandvik replied:

>This is a scary area, where the installation program can't guess
>all the possible arrangements that the administrator would wish
>to have. I've tested both CMS and Silverlining for A/UX disk
>partitioning, and even if their interfaces are bizarre, they do
>their job quite well.
---stuff deleted-----
>Otherwise HD Setup with Apple harddisks asks for a rich set of
>possible A/UX setups before the installation. The installation
>software is quite different compared with the old A/UX 1.1
>installation program.

To which Alexis Rosen replied:

>This is the real problem. It is disgraceful that HD Setup won't partition
>3rd party drives. I wouldn't mind if it could put drivers on them too, but
>that's not so critical. But Apple refuses to sell reasonably large disks,
>and sticks us with the archaic and arcane dp. I was under the strong
>impression that this was going to change in 2.0.1, but if I did hear such
>a commitment, it wasn't kept. What happened to "easy to use" and "great user
>interface"?

I really agree with Alexis here. I was unaware that Apple does not support
multiple HFS partitions on a physical device for the Mac OS. We use so many
3rd party drives around here that, we just assumed that everyone could 
get as many HFS partitions/physical device as they wanted. Have pity on
the poor souls who use Apple as their only source. 

This really is a
deplorable situation. The desktop file really bogs down when the number
of files on an HFS partition gets above a few thousand. I even ran into a situation
once when I was unable to create any new files when I reached about 3500
files on the partition. The machine just froze with its little watch icon
spinning and I had to reboot.

So what is a user to do if he/she has a large hard disk and several thousand
small files. Well StuffIt would help by combining the files into archives,
but this may not be an ideal solution for all users. One could use SilverLining
or similiar partitioning software. Or one could buy lots of small hard disks
from Apple at twice (or more) the going market price.

Come on folks at Apple. ONE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM'S MAIN FUNCTIONS IS TO
EFFICIENTLY MANAGE FILES AND FILE STRUCTURES. UNIX is very popular because
over twenty years ago the people at Bell Labs realized this and wrote
an operating system with this in mind. Because of this foresight UNIX
is a very expandable OS. We run it here at NASA on supercomputers and
mass storage systems (with the ability to handle over a terabyte of data!)
I read in MacWeek all the great things System 7.0 will provide the MacOS
community (hot links, etc.), but I haven't read anything on improvements
to the MacOS file system. Even modifying HS Setup to allow multiple HFS
Partitions per physical device would be a help. But no - it seems Apple is
intent on putting on several layers of frosting before they have finished baking
the cake.

Dr. Forrest Lumpkin
Aerothermodynamics Branch
NASA Ames Research Center
Mountain View, CA
My opinions are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.