not everybody likes vfat. I don't even know if it works on floppies or
not.....
besides, I like to use low-level stuff on dos partitions. I have never
installed Windows 95 and I don't intend to...it's long file names just
don't attract me.
> > 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.
there are not lfn-aware replacements for some of the tools that I use in
DOS, a few dating back to 1988, etc.... unmaintained.
> > 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).
So vfat is really really not a good solution for everyone. UMSDOS has been
here since the beginning and before we commit ourselves to using a
Microsoft standard (vfat) compared to a Digital Research standard (fat),
both of which are horrible, the former even worse, lets have a look and
realize that many people are dependant on umsdos and converting to vfat
only adds another layer of annoyance.
I can't stand dealing with vfat since whenever I trade files with anyone I
end up with Fejakoea.~1
The extentions don't match and the file doesn't show up. UMSDOS takes care
of this beautifully, moving from vfat to fat to floppy to unix, no
filenames are lost.
vfat on the other hand, mangles everything into file.~# and defeats the
whole purpose (preserving the long names AND directory data, gid,uid,etc).
If I had my way everyone would be ext2, but uvfat is not imho a viable
alternative for everyone to umsdos.
Converting would mean these things:
- I probably would have to dirty my system by installing 95 to do the
actual convertion, and having 8 or 9 dos drives it would take a while and
some amount of effort.
- I would have to replace my old trusty assembly dos utilities with icky
bloated ones that support lfns
- I would lose a large amount of data in the form of filenames and
information when moving from floppy to zip disk to hard drive to fat drive
to unix, etc
- without some sort of special convertion utility all my existing umsdos
filenames and permissions would be lost
- I would have to deal with the non-case-sensitivity of dos and long file
names
blah blah blah
my point: umsdos isn't dead yet..........just fix it and don't worry about
it
> -=- James Mastros
-TR