Spotlight on Spotlight

It’s always been a mystery to me why the HFS+ (a.k.a. Mac OS Extended) file system is so often disrespected.

The first wave of disrespect was when Mac OS X 10.0 shipped, with support for both UFS and HFS+ disk formats. Despite the fact that HFS+ was both the default and strongly recommended by Apple, numerous Unix nerds took it upon themselves to format their startup volumes using UFS. The guys who did this were the sort of people who wanted to believe that Mac OS X was more like “Unix with a Mac-like appearance” than what it really is — the Mac OS with Unix-like underpinnings.

The reasons cited for using UFS typically included gems such as:

  • I prefer a case-sensitive file system.
  • I hate resource forks, and they’re going away, anyway.
  • I hate file type and creator metadata. And they’re going away, anyway.
  • HFS-specific features aren’t compatible with command-line tools.

(The second and third reasons are often conflated by misinformed individuals who believe that type/creator metadata is stored in the resource fork; it’s not. Just like any other metadata — such as the filename and the creation/modification dates — type/creator metadata is stored in the file system, not in the file itself.)

The gist of it boiled down to I’m a Unix tough guy; I have no need for that deprecated Mac OS baby stuff. For typical desktop use, there were never any actual technical reasons for using UFS in lieu of HFS+; it just sounded like a nerdy thing to do.

Of course, every person I’ve encountered who tried this eventually repented and reformatted their drive as HFS+. The truth is that HFS+ is — unsurprisingly — much better-suited to Mac OS X than UFS.

The next wave of HFS+ disrespect started two years ago when Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo, renowned file system design expert and creator of the highly-regarded, metadata-rich Be File System. Ah-hah, exclaimed the peanut gallery, Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo to write a brand-new file system to replace HFS+!

Flash-forward to last week’s WWDC announcements, where Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) will include an updated suite of command-line tools (e.g. cp and tar) that fully support HFS+ resource forks and metadata.

The only negative thing that can be said about this is that it’s about fucking time. Updating the tools to support HFS features is a much better solution than trying to ram the less-featured UFS down everyone’s throat as a sop to the limitations of 30-year-old command-line tools.

In short, 10.4 is going to offer more support for HFS+ features, not less.

And so what then has Giampaolo been working on? One answer, we now know, is that he’s been adding metadata features on top of HFS+. Specifically, Spotlight — which is, in the words of one WWDC attendee, Giampaolo’s “baby”.

“Spotlight” is much more than just the visible UI shown during Jobs’s keynote: the vibrant blue search field in the top-right corner of the screen, and accompanying search results window. That’s Spotlight, the user-visible keynote-demo-able front-end.

Under-the-hood, however, Spotlight is also a set of APIs accessible by third-party developers. It’s an entirely new metadata database — not replacing the existing HFS+ file system, but instead built on top of it.

Via email, the aforementioned source who attended the Spotlight session at WWDC sent me the following report.

Spotlight is completely, relentlessly focused on files and files’ metadata. Files are the only object returned to Spotlight queries. Two aspects of Jobs’ keynote were thus misleading:

  • The “spotlight” effect on System Preferences was wholly unrelated to Spotlight.

  • Spotlight’s ability to show results from Apple Mail archives on Jobs’ machine was tantamount to a sham. Believe it or not, Tiger Mail has switched to an “exploded” Maildir-like storage format with a single message per file.

One implication of Spotlight’s file-centricity is that its ability to search “email” might not apply to clients other than Apple Mail — it’s the fact that the new Tiger version of Mail stores each message as a separate file that allows Spotlight to effectively return individual mail messages as search results. No other major mail client uses a one-message-per-file storage format.

[Update: The current version of Apple Mail — included with Mac OS X 10.3.x — already uses a one-message-per-file mail storage format for IMAP accounts (including .Mac accounts). For POP accounts, however, it uses “mbox” files. Beginning with 10.4, it will apparently use a one-message-per-file storage format for all mailboxes. Also, GyazMail already uses a one-message-per-file mailbox storage format.]

Spotlight’s full-text search is outsourced to SearchKit, which will be considerably faster in Tiger (“3× indexing, 20× incremental search” over Panther). So, Spotlight has three places to look for information about files: its own hand-tuned substring-matching metadata store (built by Giampaolo, not part of Core Data or anything else), Carbon’s HFS+ catalog calls (so Spotlight will respond to searches for type and creator), and SearchKit’s full-text index.

Both metadata collection and full-text indexing depend on cooperating per-file-format Importers, either written by Apple or by third parties. Like Google, no matter how much text an Importer provides, Spotlight only cares about the first 100K of raw text.

Importers are fired on every file the moment it is created, saved, changed, or moved, including when files are made available through a newly mounted drive. Performance is said to be excellent in every case except network-mounted home directories, which are bedeviling on several levels and on which they’re still working.

It’s through the default set of Importers that Spotlight is able to index and search format-specific metadata, such as the ID3 tags in MP3 files.

What’s cool about this architecture is that Spotlight’s indexes will thus stay up-to-date automatically. All you need to do is save, move, or copy a file, and Spotlight’s metadata and content indexes will note the changes on-the-fly. Compare and contrast to the full-content file searching previously provided via Sherlock, which required periodic monolithic re-indexing of the content of your drives.

At the API level, Spotlight responds to a range of C-like, Google-like query modifiers: ==, !, -, <, >, <=, >=, and both leading/trailing *. Queries can toggle case-insensitivity, and also diacritical insensitivity. High-level Cocoa APIs and comfortably low-level Carbon/CoreServices APIs are available in addition to the Finder UI.

Spotlight is going to kick a great deal of ass.

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