Re: VFAT kernel considerations

[Anthony Jacques <jacquesa@zetnet.co.uk>]

q-funk@megacom.net (Martin-Eric Racine) wrote:
>
> 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.

Maybe you should read them again. :)

8<- - - 
   VFAT=D,F,H

   will activate VFAT extension for drives D:, F: and H: 
respectively. It is NOT
   recommended to use VFAT extension for your BOOT drive.
8<- - -

>    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.

Yes, I agree. This is why as well as the "NEWFATFS" keyword there is
the VFAT keyword [I assume]. The docs say that the old TOSFS [and hence
the NEWFATFS keyword] will be removed when the newfatfs has been 
debugged - which does not mean the same as all fat-fs's using VFAT.
    
>    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?

I have no strong opinions on this. If there is no good reason to change,
I say stay with what we have atm.
    
> 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.

One such URL is: http://cdl.uta.edu/cpm/

However, I think you will find that the "newfatfs" is what you mean
- TOSfs moved inside the kernel [either with or without the GEMDOS
code]. Note that the GEMDOS sources are very old - for ex. they 
probably have no support for 1.44Mb disks.

Anthony
-- 
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Anthony Jacques           IRC: AnthonyJ | Bad Mood, GEM-DEU, FracTalk,
                          ICQ: 11287923 | STOS patching, Falcon Extn,
jacquesa@zetnet.co.uk                   | MiNT.CNF, Reschange, Tuna,
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/jacquesa/ | and more... which shall I do?
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