VFAT kernel considerations

[q-funk@megacom.net (Martin-Eric Racine)]

After playing around with 1.15.b2 for about a week, a few things
just popped into mind:

1) Docs recommend trying VFAT on the boot drive.

   I have reservations about that. Basically, I consider partition
   assignment following this scheme:
   
   A: VFAT
   B: disabled (toggle_B) or favorite FS (VFAT, Minix, Ext2, ...)
   C: TOSFS
 D-Z: favorite FS (VFAT, Minix, Ext2, ...)

   The problem I have with completely eliminating TOSFS is because
   I consider C: as a "compatibility" partition.  Several old apps
   implicitely expect finding FILENAME.EXT even though filename.ext
   should be acceptable, because the code uses uppercase filenames.
   
   Some recent example of this is NEWSie, which passes an uppercase
   filename to the text editor, but writes using lowercase to disk,
   hence neither qed nor everest would find the file, if using VFAT
   or Minix partitions for NEWSie's temp dir...
   
   Therefore, I strongly recommend keeping C: as TOSFS only.


2) The good ol' GEMDOS/MiNT case conversion rule.

   Since enabling VFAT on A, I notice files are always written as
   lowercase, even though I might have copied from a TOSFS drive.
   
   This seems to be good time to perhaps reconsider the case rule.
   From FAT to VFAT, I would have expected things to remain uppercase.
   
   Any opinions about this?
   
FYI, GEMDOS sources are available on a CP/M fan site (I don't have a URL
handy) if you're interrested in moving TOSFS inside the kernel.
(I have downloaded them; if you need, just ask). 
   
   
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