Re: VFAT kernel considerations

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi!

On Mon, May 18, 1998 at 11:27:36AM -0400, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:
> 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?

HP-UX has file system utilities doscp, dosls, dosrm etc. which
read/write M$-DOG compatible disks in the floppy drive.  The
dos*-utilities have a switch that control if you want to convert
the filenames to uppercase or not and I STRONGLY recommend to
do the conversion.  I've once written a disk without conversion
(i.e. filenames were lowercase), put that disk into a client's
MS-DOS box and ... very embarrassing:  The `dir' command did
work alright on the disk, filenames were neatly listed all
lowercase but you could neither read, nor write, nor copy nor
delete any of the files because DOS utilities seem to convert
all filenames given on the command line automatically to uppercase.

Maybe this story is off-topic and I know that my good ol'
GEMDOS handled the disk correctly but Frank should bear that
special feature of M$-DOG in mind.  Not all users of these
incompatible compatible industrial standard boxes that I have
heard about have the market leader's new OS Windows 95 ...

> 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). 

Ask! Thanks.

Ciao

Guido
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