paid work: vfat symlinks, attributes and special files

[Tomas M <tomas@slax.org>]

Good morning.
I'd like to kindly offer a paid job to someone interested. I'm willing 
to pay $500 for it, nevertheless I'm open to all suggestions. I hope 
it's OK to post this offer here.

I'd like to see some features implemented in VFAT filesystem, which 
would be available per a mount option, for example:
    mount -t vfat -o unix /dev/hda1 /mnt

There has been many attempts to implement some of these features in vfat 
lately, while no implementation actually made it's way to Kernel. Umsdos 
was removed from kernel as well (which was a good idea indeed).

I agree that people shouldn't use VFAT at all :) as there are many 
filesystems for Linux which are more suitable for day-to-day work.
But the amount of attempts to enhance vfat shows that many people really 
need some (even limited) improvements to vfat for some purpose.

So here is what I need:

- special file support (symlink,pipe,fifo,socket,c devs,b devs)
- executable / not executable bit
Nothing more is needed at all.

I believe there is some spare space in the VFAT structure to implement 
these easily. I believe we just need one single byte, I would use lcase 
char, while the other infos (eg. major/minor numbers, link target, 
etc..) would be stored inside the particular special file (so not in the 
metadata). But your implementation is up to you, of course.

Requirements:

- The code must be clean so it could possibly be included in Kernel, 
nevertheless it's not required to be accepted by kernel people - they 
sometimes tend to reject interesting stuff, this is something I can live 
with :)

- The filesystem must be perfectly readable in Windows.

- All files created in Windows (or in Linux without the mount option) 
should appear as a regular non-executable files in Linux after the mount 
option is used.

Payment:

As noted at the top of this message, I'm willing to pay $500 to the 
developer of these changes. I don't know how easy/hard would it be do 
implement, so if you say why the price should be bigger, I'll reconsider 
it. I believe it's a fair offer.

Payments are possible by paypal, wire transfer or money in the envelope.

If you are willing to develop requested changes, let me know please, 
I'll wait till 19th of January for answers and then I'll post a message 
to the list who will do it (if somebody is found).

Thank you very much

Tomas M
slax.org