Red Hat Diaries/003c

RandomApp III

>> Total size on disk is 8097 bytes.
>
>Whoa!!!

Well that is big if you ask me. After all, all I do is store a 
dialog script. There are a few lines of code. I have a few 
objections to the compile mechanism. Needs some good object on disk 
before he can give fast builds. But as long as the final product...

The directory as application thing comes from NS. You have a 
directory which to the user looks like an application. You double 
click it and the OS is clued in, and you start the application.

But the app hides behind that directory. It has code (the EXE) and 
then it has resources which may be subdivided into language groups.

The reason - or so they say - is that if a user starts moving things 
around, files won't get lost.

Yet if you have any given file system, there will be loss of disk 
free space, and there's no getting around that.

Your app itself is a directory - scratch one cluster.

This directory will have one sub-directory - new cluster.

This sub-directory will lead to platform-specific sub-directories 
and a resource sub-directory.

The platform-specific sub-directories have the EXEs. OS X has one 
only - MacOS.

The resource sub-directory has English.lproj, and then for each 
additional language...

So that's a lot of directories. That's a lot of waste. The problem 
here, as I see it, is that it's not set up to let apps share the 
same sub-directories. Work? Yes it works. It's what the NS designers 
decided on years ago. But given disk systems it can be wasteful. Not 
on a Unix file system mind you, which is where they started, but on 
Mac's file system it's gonna cost.

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