Hi! Now as TomTom appears to have surrendered to Microsoft and Microsoft seems to have accepted this deal probably in order to not find out that their patents are void, I think replacing VFAT as standard cross platform filesystem on removeable media would be an even better idea than before [1]. Granted I believe the patents will be made void one day, but even then I think it would make sense to replace VFAT for technical reasons. Such a filesystem IMHO should have the following features: - cross platform with implementations for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X at least, also the varios BSD variantes come to my mind - open source - probably some support for flash media without or with bad wear leveling - some kind of journaling or other metadata consistency guarentee People use ext2 as an alternative, but that lacks journaling. I could also think of UDF with write support, but I am not sure whether Windows and Mac OS X has write support. Or probably even a new filesystem as long as people appear to write one filesystem after another these days. Or some kind of FAT *without* compatibility hacks, but I think this would still be an inferior solution as long as it doesn't provide for metadata consistency. Maybe this could become some kind of Linux Foundation or FSF joint effort? Together with advertising and advocacy of free software users this could probably really replace VFAT in the long term. What do you think? What other features would make sense to for such a filesystem. I am willing to test such a filesystem and help with documentation as well as advocacy. But for coding I better start with something easier ;-). [1] http://www.h-online.com/open/TomTom-Microsoft-settle-patent-dispute--/news/112964 Ciao, -- Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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