On 17.04.2009, at 15:25, Niko Schwarz wrote:



    On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Rainer M Krug <r.m.krug@gmail.com> wrote:





        1) I like the lyx format as it is BECAUSE it is not compressed, so I

        would definitely not change the default format.





    Ok, maybe I didn't make myself clear: you can have self-contained archives

    with no compression at all on OSX. It works like this: you make a directory

    and in that directory you dump a special file that tells finder to display

    the directory as a package.



    But from the command line, it is still a directory. And in finder, you can

    look into the package by choosing "Show Package Contents" from the pop up

    menu.



    Now Pages files for example come as such "packages", you can copy that

    directory around, send it through email (yea, email clients handle it

    surprisingly well), and it still works.



    Now, other operating systems see a directory and not a package. People using

    something other than OSX would have to be reminded to copy the directory

    around the .lyx file around, which would be managed by lyx.



    The file would still be accessible, no performance penalty, but complete

    send-aroundability, and while it might feel a little alien on other OS's, on

    OSX it's the standard way to do such things, so OSX users will cheer.





No, they won't.



The thing is that OSX -- or at least the OSX applications that use this concept, 

with Pages being a good (well, bad) example -- do *not* treat packages as true 

directories, but as a "personal container". Whenever you save a Pages document, for 

instance, Pages deletes everything in the "directory" that was not created by 

itself. This can be quite surprising!  Pages might also decide to rename its files 

in the directory. And so on.





All tools that need to manage side-by-side metadata in directories (such as CVS and 

SVN) are inherently unusable with OSX apps that use the package format. You just 

cannot put a Keynote presentation into an svn repository...





Packages are one of those OSX standards that are conceptually nice, but 

unfortunately seriously broken in the actual implementation.