HFS+ Utilities, BUGS

• Disk First Aid will hang with some strange behaviour in case the length of a key does not match the length of the string inside the key (Ill try to report this bug to Apple ;-)
• HFS+ cotains hints for the finder what encoding (Roman, Asiatic, etc. to use. These are not supported. MacOS may react strange on files or folders that are not marked but need such an encoding.
• HFS+ contains POSIX permissions which are not used by MacOS <= 9, but probably by MacOS X. None of the HFS+ utils cares fore those by now. This should be implemented in some later version.
• hpfsck will not complain abut files/folders without thread and vice versa. All sorts of strange results will happen when using such a volume.
• hpfsck will not complain about records without parent. They will not show up, but are still there. Fixing this is a difficult task.
• Error handling ist not always consistent and will need a cleanung once the major goals are reached. You sometimes will get errors without any message (failed: No Error) or errors with wrong explanation (Internal errors that were caught and handled.)
• The conversion from and to unicode does not work fully. Files with extended characters are not created correctly and therefore are not found by MacOS. The sorting of files with extended characters will be different from the result of a "normal" sort. (How does kanji work with linux ?).
• HFS+ allows any charcter as name. MacOS does not allow ':' since it is used as folder seperator. I dont know what MacOS X allows. With hfsplus the standard unix . and .. is used to denote the current and parent directory. Thus using '.' or '..' as filenames will result in unpredictable behaviour.
• Unicode Strings that convert to UTF-8/ISO Strings longer than 255 characters will be trunctated. (In case you run into this theoretically bug please send Email to <klaus.halfmann@feri.de> Im curious :)
• The creation date of a mac volume is set in local time. (So mac programs do not think the volume has changed when the timezone or DST changes). This difference is ignored since Linux/Unix per default only uses UUTC times. (In practice this should not matter.)
• The volume name must not contain the charcter ':' (Which is rather unlikely with MacOS but theoretically possible). This is a limitation of the hfsputils which need to save some information in a text file.
• The Macbinary and BinHex formats contain limitations on the length of filenames, longer names will (hopefully) be truncated.
• The Macbinary and BinHex formats are unable to cope with 64 bit file length. Such files can not be copied using these formats, use raw mode instead.
• The globbing mechanism in hpls and other functions can (per desgin) not match patterns spaning directories so 'a*b' or 'a{/,b}c' will not match 'a/b'. (I dont think a normal ls * does this, perhaps Im --pedantic here :)
• hpls does not support the unix '.' and '..' notation completly. '.' will be shown, but '..' not. hpls '.' and hpls '..' wont work. (hpcd '..' will work :). Since HFS+ does not really have these concepts It is somewhat difficult to implement this completly.
• The Partition code could be a bit better and should release the Memory allocated, but I'm happy its there at all ;-)

 $Id: bugs.html,v 1.3 2002/03/26 20:47:26 klaus Exp $