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Hi folks,

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I recently learned of a number of problems in hfsutils, but the good news is that I have made a new release, 3.2.6, to correct them.

This version fixes the following significant problems since 3.2.2:

* A problem was fixed in the B*-tree node splitting code which could have caused the libhfs routines to crash under some rare circumstances. [Thanks to John Witford for discovering this.]

* A problem was fixed with the handling of catalog and extents clump sizes on large volumes which, while not a serious problem, was resulting in what was perceived as B*-tree corruption. (This was first fixed in 1.15b but was re-introduced in 3.0b1, alas.) [Thanks to Steve Revilak for helping to isolate this.]

* A problem was fixed where volumes were not being marked "cleanly unmounted," causing them to undergo a scavenging operation whenever the volume was opened again either with hfsutils or on a real Macintosh. This accounts for some of the "slow operation" some people have reported.

There are a number of smaller changes as well, including:

* Better Tcl/Tk configuration discovery.

* Changes to the OS I/O API to use 512-byte blocks rather than individual bytes.

* A number of const/signed/unsigned improvements for the compiler.

* A few scavenging fixes and improvements.

* API changes to hfs_mount() and hfs_format() to support several new options, including HFS_OPT_NOCACHE (to prevent libhfs from using its internal block cache), HFS_OPT_ZERO (to force newly allocated blocks to be zero-initialized before use), and HFS_OPT_2048 (to force 2048-byte physical-block file boundaries, compatible with hybrid ISO 9660 schemes.)

The new release can be obtained from:

ftp://ftp.mars.org/pub/hfs/

As always, the hfsutils home page is:

http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/hfs/

Cheers,

- -- Robert Leslie rob@mars.org