Re: umsdos/uvfat

James Mastros (root@jennifer-unix.dyn.ml.org)
Sun, 1 Feb 1998 21:29:36 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 2 Feb 1998, Matija Nalis wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 1998 at 06:43:32PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> > On Sat, 31 Jan 1998 "C. Jasper Spaans" <spaans@vvtp.tn.tudelft.nl>
> >
> > This is where *u*vfat comes in (reread Albert's post carefully). uvfat
> > would add permissions -- and maybe other POSIXy features -- to vfat, so
> > that we can reclaim that horrible vfat partition as linux-usable space.
>
> There are few good things about umsdos:
>
> 1) not all world has converted yet to Win95, some still has only old DOS
> partitions around. Which work without ugly vfat thingies.
So? We convert them to vfat. All but the most low-level (defragmenters,
fsckers) will work fine.

> 2) I can use any old dos tool or anything that doesn't have a clue about
> umsdos to zip, copy, or whatever whole directory structures, and then
> unzip/copy them somewhere else, and whoa, without any trouble all my long
> names, permissions, owners etc. are there.
OK. This is a valid point... but any operations within Linux will work just
fine, so you can "zip, copy, or whatever", so long as you do it with
lfn-aware tools from dos, or any tools from within linux.

> 3) It's been here for a while. There are distributions that run off the
> msdos disks, that run under umsdos. Didn't seen any that does under (u)vfat.
Yeha, so? They can stay with 2.0, or they can upgrade to 2.2 and uvfat (not
all that hard, really. If nothing else, have a bootstrap with all 8.3 names
that extracts the rest with info-zip for DOS (does lfns), or under Linux).

BTW -- lfn=Long File Names, for those who don't do dos.

-=- James Mastros

-- 
   "I'd feel worse if it was the first time.  I'd feel better if it was
   the last."  
   	-=- "(from some Niven book, doubtless not original there)" 
	    (qtd. by Chris Smith)