Open Sourcing Legacy file systems (such as HFS)?

Question

Created 3d

Replies 3

Boosts 1

Participants 4

Hopefully this is an acceptable ask and place for this:

With Apple abandoning support for certain legacy file systems, such as HFS, would this be something that could be made open source?

The idea here is to make facilitate software preservation and access, and maybe even provide the opportunity to develop an FSKit implementation via the community? Also would Apple have any strong business reason to keep it closed source once essentially considered abandoned?

Though maybe simply tryinging to port https://github.com/0x09/hfsfuse to FSKit would be more realistic in the HFS specific scenario?

Answered by DTS Engineer in 896016022

I can’t really address the wider picture here, but I do want to point out that the HFS [Plus] implementation has been open source via Darwin since The Dawn of Time™ [1]. You can find the latest version in the hfs repository. For older versions you’ll have to dig into the xnu (kernel) repository.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] Well, since Darwin was rolled out, early in the Mac OS X effort, so over 25 years ago.

Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

2d

Accepted Answer

I can’t really address the wider picture here, but I do want to point out that the HFS [Plus] implementation has been open source via Darwin since The Dawn of Time™ [1]. You can find the latest version in the hfs repository. For older versions you’ll have to dig into the xnu (kernel) repository.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] Well, since Darwin was rolled out, early in the Mac OS X effort, so over 25 years ago.

Answer 2

Claude31 OP

2d

I asked a related question a few years ago and got a valuable answer from Quinn. Discouraging to use Fuse.

If that may help.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/768957

I profit of this thread for a wider comment. There are several cases of apps or devices that ran on MacOS 7 or 8 which were really valuable but are progressively getting lost. That's the case of HFS disks content, but also for apps like Hypercard.

Would be really great to be able to revive them "as is" on MacOS 26.

Answer 3

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

2d

I asked a related question a few years ago and got a valuable answer from Quinn. Discouraging to use Fuse.

As a quick side note, that response is no longer accurate. FSKit is public API and HFS would be relatively straightforward (as file systems go...) to implement in FSKit.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware