[Interest] QFile subclass that does HFS compression?

[René J. V. Bertin]

Thiago Macieira wrote:


> Almost all the compression libraries support streaming mode. Some will have a

I'm not aware of any libraries that apply HFS compression to a stream, but above 
all, I'm not aware of any way to write HFS resource forks incrementally. I never 
tinkered with them at this level before, but nowadays they're apparently just 
another extended attribute set via setxattr(). So I don't see any other approach 
but to keep the entire resource fork in memory so you can overwrite the entire 
fork (attribute) each time one or more new compressed chunks are to be added. 
Even if you could append to an existing resource fork there's the fact that the 
block or chunk table or however you wish to call it comes before the actual 
chunks themselves. Evidently that table grows if you don't know the final file 
size at the start. It's understandable that this table sits at a known location 
at the start of the compressed data but it does get in the way.

I guess that could explain why no one wrote a streaming HFS compression library, 
and I understand better now why afsctool used a rather blunt implementation 
before I started optimising it a bit (1 buffer to hold the entire original file, 
and one buffer large enough for the worse-case compressed result plus the 
corresponding chunk table).

> pull mechanism, where it will ask you for a number of bytes; others will have
> a way for you to detect the next block's size so it can be decoded. Usually,
> memory usage in the decoder is not that big, but it might rise to a megabyte
> or two for large, well-compressed files.

When did this become about decoding (decompressing)?

R.