Follow Finder Alias implements a last-ditch attempt at resolving aliases. If you’re using RevRdist, Cap, or early versions of EtherShare then you may find it useful. If you aren’t, you won’t - the Alias Manager normally does an excellent job of tracking aliases, and Follow Finder Alias won’t have any affect. Follow Finder Alias fixes the following problems:
• RevRdist sometimes fails to update aliases correctly. When an alias is present on a master image, RevRdist copies it to a client Mac and attempts to patch it to point to the correct file (with respect to the client volume). Unfortunately, this sometimes fails. In addition, creating suitable “master image” aliases for RevRdist has always been somewhat awkward - restart without extensions, create, restart again, include an “* alias :O-Z-” line in your control file, go round all your client Macs and remove bad aliases... Follow Finder Alias corrects these problems - client aliases will always work, and nothing special needs to be done when creating aliases for master images (apart from turning file sharing off when creating them).
• Certain AppleShare implementations (i.e., Cap at up to patch level 194, and pre-2.2.0 versions of EtherShare) do not support things called “file IDs” or “directory IDs”. These are numbers assigned to files/directories which persist between sessions, and can be used to uniquely identify a given file system object. Unfortunately, the Alias Manager is pretty well broken without them. Follow Finder Alias corrects this problem - if the Alias Manager fails to locate an item due to missing file/directory IDs, the alias is identified by its path name. Unfortunately, if an object is moved/renamed, the alias is broken (being able to track file system objects across moves/renames is one of the main advantages of file/directory IDs) and will have to be recreated. For reasonably static volumes (e.g., read only volumes), this is not a problem.
Please send cheques or cash (UK Sterling, and US Dollars only please) to:
Dair Grant,
11 Garrioch Quadrant,
North Kelvinside,
Glasgow,
Scotland
G20 8RT, UK
Payment can also be made through email by NetCash US$ (email the word “netbank-faq” to netbank-info@agents.com for more information about the NetCash system) which you may find more convenient - you can buy NetCash with your credit card by fax. If you’ve any comments, bug reports, or suggestions - feel free to email me. You should hear back from me within 48 hours (unless I’m on holiday).
-dair
(Purple Shark Software)
dair.grant@ucl.ac.uk
7/12/94
Version History
1.0a3
- Checks for presence of System 7.x and the AliasDispatch trap before installing. Just beeps if it can’t install.
1.0a2
- Introduced patch to AliasDispatch through a patch to InitAllPacks, to avoid problem caused by PowerTalk patching out the old FollowFinderAlias selector and not calling through (and since ‘P’ comes after ‘F’...).
- Conflict with BBEdit’s PopUpFuncs facility: currently unresolved.