Re: [PATCH] Add CONFIG_VFAT_NO_CREATE_WITH_LONGNAMES option

Paul E. McKenney
2009-05-02T01:37:41Z

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 05:01:09PM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> 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?

Hello, Christoph!

Hmmm... Both Tridge and Dave have Signed-off-by on the original patch,
and Steve has Acked-by, Mingming has Cc, and Dave is on the From list
rather than the Cc list, so I have to guess that there is a good chance
that you are talking about me. ;-)

However, as far as I know, none of us are lawyers, and LKML is definitely
a technical rather than a legal forum, so we really do need to stick to
technical topics. I understand that this might be a bit frustrating
to you. On the other hand, I for one much prefer being in a forum
restricted to technical topics than to be in those places designed to
handle legal topics!

I suspect that this is not the answer that you were looking for, and
I do apologize for any disappointment, but this does happen to be the
answer that I have.

Thanx, Paul