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I am pleased to announce the availability of a new line of `hfsutils' development.

PLEASE NOTE!

Beginning with this release, the version number of the release gives an indication of the expected quality-of-release.

Releases are numbered X.Y[.Z] where X is the major version, Y is the minor version, and Z is a patch-release version.

Even-numbered Y numbers represent "stable" releases. Odd-numbered Y numbers represent "development" releases.

Development releases may not be as well-tested as the stable ones, although they may contain many more features and improvements. Once a development tree has been tested enough to be believed to be stable, a new stable release will be made to reflect this.

Version 3.1 of hfsutils is now available here:

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

A number of improvements have been made over version 2.0, including:

* A new internal block cache; multiple consecutive volume blocks are read and written with fewer system calls, and are cached for efficiency. The result is an enormous performance boost on many platforms.

* Three bug fixes: - the alternate MDB was sometimes written to the wrong location on non-partitioned media; - the Extents Overflow file could become corrupted under some circumstances in which a heavily fragmented file is removed; and - it was possible for the volume allocation routine to become caught in an infinite loop.

* Character set translation (MacOS Standard Roman <=> ISO8859-1 [Latin-1]) now occurs when copying text files, in addition to end-of-line conversion.

* Several libhfs API changes: - hfs_create() now returns an open file reference like hfs_open(); - hfs_format() accepts a list of bad blocks which are to be spared; - hfs_mount() and hfs_format() now require the given partition number to exist, or allow 0 to specify the entire medium; and - new routines hfs_zero(), hfs_mkpart(), hfs_nparts() allow new partition maps and HFS partitions to be created and counted;

* Entire package is now configured via a GNU `configure' script. Details for the new, simplified installation procedure can be found in the distributed `README' file.

* Many other minor improvements.

A number of people have asked recently about the potential for HFS+ support (aka Sequoia or Extended Format) in this package. The answer is yes, I have already begun to implement support for HFS+ volumes. This will become available in a stable release beginning with version 4.0.

I have reason to believe it may be technically possible to convert standard HFS volumes into HFS+ volumes without the need to reformat; if so, I plan to include a utility to do this as well.

In the meantime, I should note that I currently have very limited access to real HFS+ machines for testing -- and therefore any contributions (in the form of time or hardware :-) are extremely welcome.

I would appreciate your feedback on this software. You may send me email directly, or give feedback on the hfsutils web page:

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

Cheers,

- -- Robert Leslie rob@mars.org