On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 07:59:28PM -0600, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 06:37:29PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 05:01:09PM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote: > > > >From the complete lack of technical arguments it's pretty obvious that > > > this seems to be some FUD fallout from the MS vs TomTom patent lawsuite. > > > > > > I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how much of a threat it is. But either > > > the case gets shot down by showing prior art and everything is fine, or > > > we indeed are in deep trouble and should remove it completely. Given > > > the Cc list on here IBM seems to have some legal opinion on it, so can > > > we please see it and discuss what we want to with all cards on the > > > table? > > > > Hello, Christoph! > > > > Hmmm... Both Tridge and Dave have Signed-off-by on the original patch, > > and Steve has Acked-by, Mingming has Cc, and Dave is on the From list > > rather than the Cc list, so I have to guess that there is a good chance > > that you are talking about me. ;-) > > > > However, as far as I know, none of us are lawyers, and LKML is definitely > > a technical rather than a legal forum, so we really do need to stick to > > technical topics. I understand that this might be a bit frustrating > > to you. On the other hand, I for one much prefer being in a forum > > restricted to technical topics than to be in those places designed to > > handle legal topics! > > So what's the purely technical argument for including this patch? Pretty much what it says in the config-variable description in the patch itself. To recap, with some technical elaboration: 1. It allows you to read VFAT media, mixed-case long names and all. Full compatibility for reading from existing media. 2. It allows opening existing mixed-case long-named files both for reading and writing. 3. For file creation, only the 8.3-format filename is permitted. Such a name can be stored in a single VFAT directory entry. 4. It allows you to create files with both uppercase and lowercase 8.3-format names, as long as the 8-character portion is either entirely uppercase or entirely lowercase, and as long as the 3-character extension is either entirely uppercase or entirely lowercase. This again keeps the name confined to a single VFAT directory entry. >From the original patch, with a couple additional examples added: o Creating FILE1234.TXT is allowed. o Creating FILE12345.TXT or FILE1234.TEXT is prohibited, as neither fits the 8.3 format. o Creating FILE.TXT, FILE.txt, file.TXT, and file.txt would all be allowed, and would create files by exactly those names. o Attempting to create File.TxT will give you a file named FILE.TXT. There you have it! Thanx, Paul -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
