pure roon

Tom Karpik has discovered what appears to be a fundamental error with the directory moving code from Max OS X Leopard. It turns out that when moving files from one medium to another the mechanisms in place to ensure that the transfer occured without error are seriously flawed.

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In terms of pseudo code, moving from/to different volumes might look something like this:

move(source, destination) {
returnVal = copy(source, destination);

if(returnVal == TRUE) { // copy success
delete(source);
} else { // copy fail
message("Move failed");
}
}

This is where the problem with the Mac OS X 10.5.0 Finder lies.

When you move data from one medium to another, generally you would check that the data was ‘all present and correct’ on the target before removing from the host. Leopard seems to have decided that this is unnecessary, maybe in an attempt to save some time? Now there is no check and if the target medium is removed or the transfer interrupted in any way, you will lose your data permanently from both mediums. This bug has been found as far back as Panther, so it’s been around for a while, and q quick search of google reveals a large number of people suffering from this bug.

This is bad, very bad as I can verify from my own experiences. Data transfers sometimes fail, especially when there is a large amount of small files being transferred. On my Vista/Fedora 7 machine at home all of my files are hosted through samba on a fedora 7 file server in my basement, and sometimes I get errors when moving files between the server and my local, but I am always confident that the data will still be in it’s original location.

If you would like a full graphical walk through of the bug please go here

Quite an interesting yet lengthy review of MAC OS X 10.5 Leopard, well worth a read though.
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That was exactly two and a half years ago, to the day. It seems that I’ve gotten my wish and then some. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they’ve only grown as the months and years have passed. Apple’s tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good.

Maybe the average Mac user just expects another incrementally improved version of Mac OS X. Eighteen months, two and a half years, who’s counting? Maybe we enthusiasts are just getting greedy. After all, as Apple’s been so fond of touting, there have been five releases of Mac OS X in the time it’s taken Microsoft to deliver Windows Vista.

[..]

That’d be like congratulating someone for extinguishing the left half of his body after intentionally lighting himself on fire.