The true horrors of HFS+ are not in how it’s not a great filesystem, but in how it’s actively designed to be a bad filesystem by people who thought they had good ideas.
The case insensitivity is just a horribly bad idea, and Apple could have pushed fixing it. They didn’t. Instead, they doubled down on a bad idea, and actively extended it – very very badly – to unicode. And it’s not even UTF-8, it’s UCS2 I think.
Ok, so NTFS did some of the same. But apple really took it to the next level with HFS+.
There’s some excuse for case insensitivity in a legacy model (“We didn’t know better”). But people who think unicode equivalency comparisons are a good idea in a filesystem shouldn’t be allowed to play in that space. Give them some paste, and let them sit in a corner eating it. They’ll be happy, and they won’t be messing up your system.
And then picking NFD normalization – and making it visible, and actively converting correct unicode into that absolutely horrible format, that’s just inexcusable. Even the people who think normalization is a good thing admit that NFD is a bad format, and certainly not for data exchange. It’s not even “paste-eater” quality thinking. It’s actually actively corrupting user data. By design. Christ.
And Apple let these monkeys work on their filesystem? Seriously?
(...)
There are lots of good reasons to not move to ZFS (cough-Oracle-cough), but they could have pushed people to case-sensitive HFS+, which would have then made it much easier to (in the long run) migrate to anything else saner. But no. There is a case sensitive option, but Apple actively hides it and doesn’t support it.
The stupidity, it burns.
So you had all these people who made really bad decisions and actively coded for them. And I find that kind of “we actively implement shit” much more distasteful than just the “ok, we don’t implement a lot of clever things” that John complained about.
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Ursprungligen postat av jazzdoktorn
