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Terrettalast Saturday at 8:12 PM2 repliesview on HN

Arguably, principle of least surprise is very Apple.

If I point "tape archive" at a file system, I want that file system archived to tape. And so, tar does.

If I don't, well, that's a fine option, and there's a fine option for that.

So it's less of a "workaround" or something that "gets worse", than, "No, I don't really want a tape archive of this filesystem, only of some of it." And that's supported.

That said, never seeing another .DS_Store should be a system-wide option!


Replies

JoshTripletttoday at 12:05 AM

> Arguably, principle of least surprise is very Apple.

Principle of least surprise is good engineering practice. The question is always whose surprise. Someone who expects tar to behave like other UNIX systems is going to be surprised by this. Someone who expects tar on Apple to have perfect fidelity would be surprised by not-this.

I increasingly feel like build systems should never be relying on any "native" utilities from the host system, and should instead be bringing them in via dependencies. You can't have this problem if your packaging system pulls in a specific portable `tar` library.

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taftsteryesterday at 11:56 PM

> That said, never seeing another .DS_Store should be a system-wide option!

Yes please.

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