Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!ogccse!blake!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!6sigma!blm
From: blm@6sigma.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Altering the Resouce fork
Message-ID: <278@6sigma.UUCP>
Date: 28 Aug 89 05:32:20 GMT
References: <1492@unocss.UUCP> <18300004@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: blm@6sigma.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Organization: Six Sigma CASE, Inc.
Lines: 26

In article <18300004@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> hoffman@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
|I've been doing that for years [an application saving preferences in
|its own resource fork]
|[...]
|It's really a neat thing

Wrong.  It's incredibly antisocial:

1.  If your application is on a readonly server, preferences can't be
    saved.

2.  If your application is on a writable server, you always get the
    preferences of the last person to use the application.

3.  If you do an incremental backup, the whole application has to be copied,
    instead of the three bits of configuration info that have changed.

4.  What happens if two people on different Macs quit the application
    (thus trying to write to the resource fork of the application on
    the server) at the same time?

Don't modify your application!
-- 
Brian L. Matthews			blm@6sigma.UUCP
Six Sigma CASE, Inc.			+1 206 854 6578
PO Box 40316, Bellevue, WA  98004