Re: file names ?

[Ryan Cumming]

On December 25, 2001 12:25, James Stevenson wrote:
> a small example is a smallish ext2 / filesystem
> and the rest being a fat filesystem to that
> it can be accessed from both windows and linux.
> and there is not enough space on the ext2 to compile a kernel anymore.

Case-insensitivity is not your only problem. 'ln -s' is used multiple times 
during the kernel build process, I'd like to see a FAT filesystem try to 
handle that. I haven't checked, but the compile might also depend on the 
executable bit actually working, and being able to rename and unlink files in 
use. Even with filenames that do not collide in a case-insensitive namespace, 
the build will fail. 

The kernel compile requires a POSIX filesystem, which is a completely sane 
demand. I'd go as far as saying that all 'real' filesystems are POSIX 
compliant, and that non-POSIX filesystems should only be used for simple data 
file storage. 

-Ryan