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LOL - for fifteen years Apple has refused to allow an ext4 formatted volume to auto-mount on a MacOS X machine.. how hard is that? Apple is non-Apple hostile,

LOL - for fifteen years Apple has refused to allow an ext4 formatted volume to auto-mount on a MacOS X machine.. how hard is that? Apple is non-Apple hostile, and proud of it

throwaway894345 5y ago
As far as I know, MacOS doesn’t support ext4 at all (I vaguely recall some read-only ext4 FUSE thing, but obviously that doesn’t help if you need to write).
- js2 5y ago
  https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ Full ext2/3/4 read-write support. $39.95. There's also fuse-ext2 via macFUSE but its doc still say: "Even though write support is available, please do not mount your filesystems with write support unless you have nothing to lose." https://github.com/alperakcan/fuse-ext2 https://github.com/alperakcan/fuse-ext2
js2 5y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "refused to allow". It's not like Apple has prevented third-parties from adding support: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ It also doesn't seem surprising to me that Apple itself wouldn't support ext2/3/4. It's something very few Mac users are going to care about. Why would Apple dedicate any resources to it? FWIW, I've been using Linux and Macs for over two decades and I can only recall maybe a single time I even wanted to mount an ext formatted drive onto a Mac, and vice-versa (HFS onto Linux). For exchanging files via floppy disks or thumb drives, various flavors of FAT have been near universal for ages. CDs/DVDs/BluRay use their own filesystem. And FTP/NFS/SMB/AFP/HTTP/SCP/RCP have been around forever for exchanging over a network. (Before ssh/scp, there was unencrypted rlogin/rsh/rcp... I'm dating myself.)
- lupire 5y ago
  Why does Windows userbase care more about Linux drive interop than Mac userbase does?
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    The problem is, there is still no somewhat decent way to have a USB drive that's readable and writable by all three major OS families (Windows, Linux and macOS) and keep UNIX permissions working on it: - FAT32 can't go above 4GB files, can't do sparse files and can't store UNIX permissions at all - NTFS can do large and sparse files, but can't deal with UNIX permissions, instead bringing NT ACLs (which no one else understands). exFAT used to be patent encumbered and has the same limitations that NTFS has, plus its support is nowhere near as battle-tested as NTFS is - HFS/APFS are not supported at all under Windows and support in Linux is spotty at best - ext4 has third-party read (and if you're risk-tolerant, write) support on Windows and Linux, but it's hacky or expensive The situation, as it is, is an utter shame.
    - derefr 5y ago
      Have you considered https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format ? You can use it on things that aren’t optical media.
    - js2 5y ago
      Why? Who needs this? I don't even understand the use case for file permissions on an external drive. Who owns the files across operating systems? FWIW, the company I linked elsewhere provides full ext4 support products for both macOS and Windows.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        > Why? Who needs this? I don't even understand the use case for file permissions on an external drive. Shoving data across operating systems using USB sticks or drives is a pretty standard thing to do, at least in the corporate world which is filled with slow internet connections (in related words, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with SD cards), and particularly when having to send data to clients or vendors. The fact that there is no standard that works on all three major OS families and in the best case also supports encryption is maddening - macOS has Filevault, Windows has Bitlocker and Linux has LUKS, and neither of the three can understand any other. Just ask an IT helpdesk in any major company how many questions they get a day by people who have to transfer files to a vendor or client, with encryption. Extra fun in anything involving creative work because most of that happens on Macs whereas most big-corp customers use Windows because of Active Directory and GPO. (And no, ZIP isn't an answer because Apple's built-in unarchiver routinely gobbles up when encountering password protected ZIPs) > I don't even understand the use case for file permissions on an external drive. Unlike Windows which conveys the fact that an executable is an executable by the file suffix .exe (or .cmd/.bat, and I think *.js was at least until Windows 7 associated with the JScript interpreter), Linux and macOS do so by using the execute permission on the file. The use case would be to copy a Java application, let's use jadx, downloaded and extracted on a Mac, then copy it via an USB stick or a Windows CIFS file share on another Mac or a Linux machine, and have the command bin/jadx-gui still start up the UI when clicked upon. As soon as any non-Unix filesystem is in the copy path, it gets inevitably nasty.
anyfoo 5y ago
How hard is it to maintain and keep secure an entire modern, complex, evolving file system which the OS itself does not even use (so nothing like simple, frozen, and interchange-standard FAT) in an operating system kernel? Very hard. Instead there are 3rd party implementations. Those are independently maintained, serving directly the (comparatively small) target audience.

LOL - for fifteen years Apple has refused to allow an ext4 formatted volume to auto-mount on a MacOS X machine.. how hard is that? Apple is non-Apple hostile, and proud of it

throwaway894345 5y ago

As far as I know, MacOS doesn’t support ext4 at all (I vaguely recall some read-only ext4 FUSE thing, but obviously that doesn’t help if you need to write).

js2 5y ago
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ Full ext2/3/4 read-write support. $39.95. There's also fuse-ext2 via macFUSE but its doc still say: "Even though write support is available, please do not mount your filesystems with write support unless you have nothing to lose." https://github.com/alperakcan/fuse-ext2 https://github.com/alperakcan/fuse-ext2

js2 5y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "refused to allow". It's not like Apple has prevented third-parties from adding support: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ https://www.paragon-software.com/home/extfs-mac/ It also doesn't seem surprising to me that Apple itself wouldn't support ext2/3/4. It's something very few Mac users are going to care about. Why would Apple dedicate any resources to it? FWIW, I've been using Linux and Macs for over two decades and I can only recall maybe a single time I even wanted to mount an ext formatted drive onto a Mac, and vice-versa (HFS onto Linux). For exchanging files via floppy disks or thumb drives, various flavors of FAT have been near universal for ages. CDs/DVDs/BluRay use their own filesystem. And FTP/NFS/SMB/AFP/HTTP/SCP/RCP have been around forever for exchanging over a network. (Before ssh/scp, there was unencrypted rlogin/rsh/rcp... I'm dating myself.)

lupire 5y ago
Why does Windows userbase care more about Linux drive interop than Mac userbase does?
- mschuster91 5y ago
  The problem is, there is still no somewhat decent way to have a USB drive that's readable and writable by all three major OS families (Windows, Linux and macOS) and keep UNIX permissions working on it: - FAT32 can't go above 4GB files, can't do sparse files and can't store UNIX permissions at all - NTFS can do large and sparse files, but can't deal with UNIX permissions, instead bringing NT ACLs (which no one else understands). exFAT used to be patent encumbered and has the same limitations that NTFS has, plus its support is nowhere near as battle-tested as NTFS is - HFS/APFS are not supported at all under Windows and support in Linux is spotty at best - ext4 has third-party read (and if you're risk-tolerant, write) support on Windows and Linux, but it's hacky or expensive The situation, as it is, is an utter shame.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Have you considered https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format ? You can use it on things that aren’t optical media.
  - js2 5y ago
    Why? Who needs this? I don't even understand the use case for file permissions on an external drive. Who owns the files across operating systems? FWIW, the company I linked elsewhere provides full ext4 support products for both macOS and Windows.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > Why? Who needs this? I don't even understand the use case for file permissions on an external drive. Shoving data across operating systems using USB sticks or drives is a pretty standard thing to do, at least in the corporate world which is filled with slow internet connections (in related words, never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with SD cards), and particularly when having to send data to clients or vendors. The fact that there is no standard that works on all three major OS families and in the best case also supports encryption is maddening - macOS has Filevault, Windows has Bitlocker and Linux has LUKS, and neither of the three can understand any other. Just ask an IT helpdesk in any major company how many questions they get a day by people who have to transfer files to a vendor or client, with encryption. Extra fun in anything involving creative work because most of that happens on Macs whereas most big-corp customers use Windows because of Active Directory and GPO. (And no, ZIP isn't an answer because Apple's built-in unarchiver routinely gobbles up when encountering password protected ZIPs) > I don't even understand the use case for file permissions on an external drive. Unlike Windows which conveys the fact that an executable is an executable by the file suffix .exe (or .cmd/.bat, and I think *.js was at least until Windows 7 associated with the JScript interpreter), Linux and macOS do so by using the execute permission on the file. The use case would be to copy a Java application, let's use jadx, downloaded and extracted on a Mac, then copy it via an USB stick or a Windows CIFS file share on another Mac or a Linux machine, and have the command bin/jadx-gui still start up the UI when clicked upon. As soon as any non-Unix filesystem is in the copy path, it gets inevitably nasty.

anyfoo 5y ago

How hard is it to maintain and keep secure an entire modern, complex, evolving file system which the OS itself does not even use (so nothing like simple, frozen, and interchange-standard FAT) in an operating system kernel? Very hard. Instead there are 3rd party implementations. Those are independently maintained, serving directly the (comparatively small) target audience.