Re: [PATCH] Add CONFIG_VFAT_NO_CREATE_WITH_LONGNAMES option

Steve French
2009-05-02T03:02:49Z

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 8:59 PM, Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx> wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 06:37:29PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
>> 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!
>
> So what's the purely technical argument for including this patch?
The strength of Tridge's approach over alternatives may be that it is clearer
to only create one name (always) and that it is relatively small.
Its weakness in my opinion is that as a sideeffect it prevents saving mixed
case file names.

There are various ways to disable (only) creating long file names, ie
to remove the ability
to create files longer than 8.3 from this module. Tridge's approach (which
basically avoids saving the alternate name, the mixed case name) works.
I realize that there are other ways to do this with trivial #ifdefs in
namei_vfat.c (see
vfat_build_slots and vfat_create_shortname), and when I tried other approaches
they worked too, although you may prefer Tridge's approach.

--
Thanks,

Steve