Re: [MiNT] ext2fs and TOS domain

[Xavier Joubert <Xavier-Joubert@defontaine.com>]

Hi,

Frank Naumann a écrit:
> I never heard of anyone who had problems with that.

I did. Twice. And I had problems too.

> Access rights for old TOS programs are just a joke. Normally you must them
> still execute as root due to Super() stuff and other things like that.

Of course it's not to use access rights with TOS programs (I agree this
would be a joke). It's just that they dedicated a partition to mint, and
they wanted also to use it for some old applications (The desktop from
AES 4.1 is an example of application which have trouble with ext2fs...
and far less with minixfs).

> You don't understand the problem. You can't solve this in a clean way.

I perfectly understand the problem. :)

Indeed, there's no clean way to solve it (Did I ever wrote I knew a
clean way ?).

> There is no way to deterministic decide the problems you get with
> case-sensitive to case-insensitive filename mapping. All what you add

Of course I know that. Only Fatfs can do this.

> will be a hack (and in general I dislike hacks as they normally have bad
> side effects).

OK. THAT's interresting. That's what I hopped you wouldn't find : an
argument against this modification.

I tend to disagree with you. Not on the fact that you dislike hacks,
that's your right and I generaly dislike them, too. Rather on the fact
that THIS modification would be a hack. Let me explain.

What you wrote let me think TOS domain support from ext2fs is already a
dirty hack. There can already be 2 files which could appear with the
same name in a directory for example (say foobarfoo.bar and
foobarfoo2.bar for example). You'd better have made no support for TOS
domain at all if you don't want any hack. I mean made it impossible to
open a file, made Fsfirst/next returning nothing,...

Since these modifications would only modify the response when in TOS
domain (which is already broken), there is no reason for side effects on
other applications. By the way, the modifications would be very
restricted (converting filenames to uppercase when in TOS domain...).

We can even improve things over the minixfs way of reacting. I think the
best thing to do is to display/allow opening only of files/direcory
whose name fit in the 8.3 scheme and which contains only valid chars for
TOS. This would prevent _all_ problems with 2 files of the same name.
Since (as any unix user) I prefer lowercase filenames, I would take any
name with at least an uppercase letter in the name as invalid for TOS,
and then only display files with lowercase names (converted to uppercase
for TOS, of course). This is also needed if we wants TOS app to see
anything in U:. Files created by TOS domain apps would of course be
stored with lowercased names. I would consider this a 100% clean support
for TOS domain.

".foobar", "abcdefghijk", "FOO.BAR", and so on
- would be impossible to open when in TOS mode,
- would never be seen with Fsfirst/Fsnext,
- ...

One can disagree with that since this prevent access to some files. 2
files with the same name already prevent access of one of them...

I think it is the way minixfs should always have reacted in TOS mode. We
could even modify it to make it react the same way. THIS would made
ext2fs and minixfs totally appropriate for TOS applications.

Did I succeed in changing your point of view ?


Regards,

Xavier Joubert