RE: VFAT.XFS versus MagiC

[Petr Stehlik <stehlik@cas3.zlin.vutbr.cz>]

    Hi All,

I'm quite shocked by the discussion going on here. Especially the insults
of Julian were very inappropriate! You should know jr has written a lot of
software for MiNT... Sven and also Julian hopefully wrote here their
opinions about the discussion already, and I can just say I agree
with them completely.

But anyway, that's not the main reason I write you a mail: I do it because
you're mixing here a few different things together. Let me list them:

1) you want to see VFAT long filenames (and possibly write them)

2) you want to read & write ZIPs and other large (>32 MB) storage media

3) you are afraid of VFAT32 and want to be compatible with it.

If you want just the long filenames, an utility for reading&writting them
under TOS/MiNT can be written in a hour or so. It's very easy, believe it
or not. But the problem of long filenames of VFAT can also be avoided very
easily - simply ZIP your files with long filenames (under Win or MiNT) and
later unpack it under the other operating system - that's all. And ZIP
also saves some bytes, so you can store more files on one diskette!

OK, but what we really need is the second point, reading and writting
large medias. As you may (should :) know, TOS and DOS (or if you want MiNT
and Windows) partitions are compatible if their size is 32 MB or less. For
reading of bigger DOS partitions you need to use MagiC or BigDOS. And
since MagiC nor BigDOS can run under MiNT, we need a third program (or a
driver) which will allow us to read big MS-DOS partitions under MiNT.

Remember, that without this driver the VFAT or VFAT32 support is useless.
And the other way round: someone will write a VFAT(32) filesystem when the
big partitions can be read under MiNT, because then we will really need
it. Writting XFS for diskettes it's really a wasting of time.

Petr
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