Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-lcc!lll-crg!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Should 64K ROMs be supported? Message-ID: <1629@hoptoad.uucp> Date: Tue, 6-Jan-87 23:29:15 EST Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1629 Posted: Tue Jan 6 23:29:15 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 7-Jan-87 03:36:36 EST References: <476@runx.OZ> <1490@hoptoad.uucp> <907@ur-tut.UUCP> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley Lines: 26 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)