Re: [PATCH] Add CONFIG_VFAT_NO_CREATE_WITH_LONGNAMES option

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 03:18:20PM -0500, Steve French wrote:
> For those manufacturers who who would like to disable
> creation of long file names, but allow reading long file names,
> and handle FAT32 on disk format and maximum sizes, it seems
> reasonable to give them a simple configure option for it.  It is
> harder, and less effective, to make the corresponding change
> to modify the mount helper and kernel code to add
> a new mount option, because it can be bypassed trivially
> at the command line (ie having to "force" mount to pass a "nolongfilename"
> mount option, would be harder than a simple kernel configure option)

Steve, can you please stop the bullshitting?

>From the complete lack of technical arguments it's pretty obvious that
this seems to be some FUD fallout from the MS vs TomTom patent lawsuite.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how much of a threat it is.  But either
the case gets shot down by showing prior art and everything is fine, or
we indeed are in deep trouble and should remove it completely.  Given
the Cc list on here IBM seems to have some legal opinion on it, so can
we please see it and discuss what we want to with all cards on the
table?