"Duane Maxwell" <dmaxwell at san.rr.com> is widely believed to have written:

> John M McIntosh wrote:
> > Mmm since I've the file primitives all spread apart on my workbench
> > to fix this mac alias problem I'm wondering if there is interested in
> > and or we should look at:
> >
> > large > 2GB files.
> 
> I think you should go for it.  It seems like anytime somebody says that
> nobody'll ever need more than XXXX of some resource, then sure enough
> somebody does.
What, you want more than 640kb of ram? Unthinkable!

> At this point, if you're in there anyway, we can at least try and
> support large files from Squeak even if the underlying OS support
> won't. There should also probably be a query to FileDirectory for the
> maximum size of a file supported by the platform in that particular
> directory - *not* a global system attribute since some platforms can support
> different file systems with different maximums in the same directory tree.
> 
> Also - did you/somebody deal with the file truncation issue?
That seems to be in the sources for the VM ok.

Maybe we could also take an opportunity to do something that would allow
sensible file copying (need to either have a primitive file copy or two
prims to read/set the file's proerties/permissions etc - tricky to do
nicely portably), plus more reasonable file exists testing (there are
currently two really stupid ways of doing that in use) plus perhaps a
prim to canonicalise filenames using any available platforn facility.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Earth is 98% full...please delete anyone you can.