For os-x carbon we attempted to implement the filecopy plugin many years back but had serious issues with Apple's failure to provide an operating system api that let you copy a file between locations and actually preserve all the meta-data for the file, date/time, permissions, ACL, os-9 attributes, endless list. Plus rules were slightly different when dealing with AppleShare Servers, and then basically gave it up as a lost cause.

However I guess I'll consider revisiting this because Apple has provide an API to move objects in a file system in 10.4 or later. We actually use this via FFI in Sophie to import data into Sophie, and to copy data between books on Save As operation. For example it preserves the OS-9 file type which indicates the file 'Foo' is a MPEG movie without having to say the file is 'Foo.mpeg' Then later when we hand 'Foo' to some audio/video apis they know what to do by reading the ancient OS-9 file type.

On Nov 18, 2007, at 4:18 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:

This is a set of support code patches that make FileCopyPlugin work on 32/64 bit images and 32/64 bit unix VMs, plus a unit test for verification.

FileCopyPluginTest-dtl.cs provides a unit test to verify operation of the FileCopyPlugin. Interestingly, the FileCopyPlugin has never worked correctly on Unix because it answered a primitiveFail after a successful copy operation. That means that the primitive code was doing the copy, and the fallback code would re-do it afterward.

The support code changes are in the following files:

• For all platforms (unix and Mac OS are impacted): platforms/Cross/plugins/FileCopyPlugin/FileCopyPlugin.h

• For Unix: platforms/unix/plugins/FileCopyPlugin/sqUnixFileCopyPlugin.c platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixCharConv.c platforms/unix/vm/sqPlatformSpecific.h

• Mac OS platform code will need an update also, but I did not try

to do this (it should be simple, but I cannot test the result).

• Win32 and RiscOS do not appear to be impacted.

Dave

<FileCopyPluginTest-dtl.2.cs><Cross-plugins-FileCopyPlugin- FileCopyPlugin.h.diff><unix-plugins-FileCopyPlugin- sqUnixFileCopyPlugin.c.diff><unix-vm-sqPlatformSpecific.h.diff><unix- vm-sqUnixCharConv.c.diff>

-- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================

Well the api for file copying that Apple provides now actually invokes the same logic that the Finder uses.

If you want Symbolic links manipulation without using this api you need to either do it via FFI, or code up a shell command and feed to the OSProcess plugin, or cheat and use AppleScript to invoke a bash shell command

I'll note when dealing with file names, you need to be careful. If you are using the standard VM it returns names in MacRoman which depending on the image you use might convert to Latin1. Most commercial like products (seaside/sophie/scratch?/plopp) use UTF8, this is controlled by a setting in the info.plist.

However the UTF8 you get from the VM is UTF8 normalized (precomposed) , but the HFS+ file level apis require UTF8 de- normalized (decomposed)

Thus having a file/directory string in UTF8 precomposed form begs the question, for the API or shell script what are the expectations for precomposed/decomposed here? Unless you use the right test data, you could have misleading results.

Ps note we painfully added unicode file dialog get/put logic for Windows to Sophie over the weekend, so that you could open, or save books like π.spb Then discovered on XP it whines about the file name contains an illegal character when you attempt to compress/zip the book file.

On Nov 18, 2007, at 11:47 PM, Keith Hodges wrote:

John M McIntosh wrote:

...

For os-x carbon we attempted to implement the filecopy plugin many years back but had serious issues with Apple's failure to provide an operating system api that let you copy a file between locations and actually preserve all the

Do we have any API for creating or manipulating Symbolic links?

thanks

Keith

-- = = = ======================================================================== John M. McIntosh johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com = = = ========================================================================