They don't need to. If an application needs to know how much free disk space there is, they use an API like statvfs(3) that queries the filesystem, which clearly knows how to compute the disk usage of itself. No application is gonna ask for the logical size of every single file on the disk; why the hell would they even care about this particular Docker.raw file?
As I said, reports like "macOS installer says there's not enough disk space because of a sparsefile somewhere" and "macOS tells me disk space is low every two minutes because of a sparsefile somewhere" just aren't credible if you understand how it works. Otherwise, how would they behave if you create a thousand "100GB files" like I demonstrated? Going all crazy? Your free disk space is negative?
> just aren't credible if you understand how it works.
Yes, your theoretical knowledge, which several of the people in that thread obviously have, beats actual experience.
Not only is that not credible, it's about as useful and insightful as "it works for me" - and who on Earth is using statvfs on a Mac? Is the installer using statvfs? You've looked, right? And you believe every developer uses the correct APIs and never introduces a bug…
Try reading and not skimming, it's especially important when dealing with bug reports.
The alternative theory is that the installer is spending a very very long amount of time (on my computer i bet that would take at least ten minutes) scanning every file on my disk to look up the declared size and totaling it to check whether the size of the disk minus that number is enough disk space, which is so absolutely ridiculous of a premise that I don't even know how it is being taken seriously.
That's an alternative theory, among many other possible ones that wouldn't lead to the dismissal of an entire thread of developers' comments based on a quick skim and the strange idea that not one of them knows what a sparse file is.
As I said, reports like "macOS installer says there's not enough disk space because of a sparsefile somewhere" and "macOS tells me disk space is low every two minutes because of a sparsefile somewhere" just aren't credible if you understand how it works. Otherwise, how would they behave if you create a thousand "100GB files" like I demonstrated? Going all crazy? Your free disk space is negative?