by , 10:45 AM EDT, June 12th, 2007

A few days before Steve Jobs's World Wide Developer Conference keynote on Monday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced that Apple would transition to his ZFS file system with Mac OS X 10.5. That announcement never came, and now Apple's senior director of product marketing for Mac OS, Brian Croll, is claiming that Leopard will stick with HFS+, according to InformationWeek.

"ZFS is not happening," he said.

One of the benefits of Sun's ZFS file system is that it can handle substantially larger file sizes than HFS+, which typically isn't an issue today, but could be a critical feature in several years.

Mr. Croll would not comment on Mr. Schwartz's statements, but did confirm that Apple has never claimed that ZFS would be included with Leopard.

Sun representatives were unavailable for comment.