Re: [PATCH] Added CONFIG_VFAT_FS_DUALNAMES option

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

Alan Cox wrote:
> From the funnies we've had in the past with FAT my gut impression is
> there are only a few implementations out there. Psion seems to have their
> own but most of the rest behave remarkably similarly which makes me
> suspect they all licensed a tiny number of implementations (DRDOS one
> perhaps ?). If we can keep most of those devices mounted 8.3 we nicely
> sidestep the issue anyway.

>From recently witnessing someone write another FAT implementation, for
an 8-bit AVR microcontroller reading SD cards, based in part on
someone elses public domain FAT implementation, fixing significant
bugs in that (including directory parsing), and then seeing it
translated from C to hand-coded AVR assembly language to save space,
with me helping teach C to the person doing it, for a commercial
product which is to be released in the next couple of months, and will
be updated with SD cards written by Linux and Windows...

>From witnessing that, for one obscure product among millions, I'd
guess there are more FAT implementations than a "few".  Perhaps there
aren't many VFAT implementations, but my gut says there are quite a
lot of independently written 8.3-only FAT ones.

-- Jamie