Re: Msdos name alias patch for 2.1.48

david parsons (o.r.c@p.e.l.l.p.o.r.t.l.a.n.d.o.r.u.s)
9 Aug 1997 13:06:41 -0700


In article <linux.kernel.Pine.LNX.3.95.970808082754.18159A-100000@pc7537.hil.siemens.at>,
Ingo Molnar <mingo@pc7537.hil.siemens.at> wrote:
>
>On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> The thing that makes me think that having the VFS layer handle
>> case-insenstitivity (but nothing else) is a good idea is that it can
>> potentially be useful even for things like ext2fs. Imagine having not to
>> worry about case in DOSEMU or Wine, but instead doing
>>
>> int fd = open("/dosc/windows/windows.ini", O_NOCASE | O_RDONLY);
>>
>> and it would work even if it was a ext2 filesystem?
>
>hm, another thing we didnt think of so far: all these
>'cross-lookup-system' tools have to convert '\' to '/'
>anyway. So we could well say 'hey if you convert, do
>it right!'.

No they don't; MS-DOS supports `/' as a directory separator as well
as `\' (the version of DR-DOS that Atari used on the ST doesn't, but
that's a pretty trivial detail); all Linux needs to worry about is
making sure that `\' doesn't get written into a filename on a fat
filesystem. (The only place I could see wanting to map `/' to `\'
would be if you wanted to write scripts that worked on both dos and
Linux, for that highly sought after port of COMMAND.COM to Linux.)

The idea of pushing a filesystem-specific name translation up into the
upper levels of the vfs doesn't seem like the most sensible way of
doing things; if I was to write a files-11 filesystem (in living
rad-50) for Linux, I'd certainly not want to push the fascist naming
rules anywhere outside that particular filesystem.

____
david parsons \bi/ this way lies [foo.bar.baz]
\/