Re: [HFS] generic/740 failure details

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2025-06-09 at 19:41 +0000, Viacheslav Dubeyko wrote:
> Frankly speaking, I don't see the point to re-write the hfs-progs in Rust for
> multiple reasons:
> (1) mostly, the main use-case that HFS/HFS+ partition is created under Mac OS
> and somebody tries to mount it under Linux to access data;
> (2) Apple is the owner of the code on Mac OS side and it's not good to
> significantly deviate from the Apple's state of the code;
> (3) I believe that Apple considers hfs-progs as obsolete code and they don't
> want any significant changes in it;
> (4) the hfs-progs is user-space tool, it is not frequently used, and even it
> fails, then there is no much harm.

Writing hfsprogs from scratch for Linux would mean though that a proper license
could be chosen that is not APSL which some distributions consider non-free.

On the other hands, the current hfsprogs utility is based on Apple's original
HFS/HFS+ code which is battle-tested and known to be reliable and robust. I'm
not sure whether we would be able to reach this level of stability within a
reasonable amount of time.

I do have to resume my work on my Linux patches again so that we can synchronize
hfsprogs with the latest upstream version.


Adrian

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