Subject: RE: LongFiles support in the ADFS fs

From: matthew <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 11:00:20 +0100

> Matthew Godbolt wrote:
> > 
> > Has anyone considered putting LongFiles support into the ADFS
> > filesystem?  If not, I'm looking for a chance to get into kernel
> hacking
> > so I volunteer myself.
> 
> Isn't there already some method of handling image file systems? ISTR
> someone muttering about the loopback mechanism as a method of doing
> this, unless I was terminally confused.
> 
Erm - I think you may be a tad confused here - LongFiles is a patch
for ADFS which allows you to have >10 characted filenames - its not an
image filesystem.  LongFiles stores a file called !!!!!!!!Z! which is a
'real'
catalog of the long filenames, and then each file which has a name
longer than
10 characters is actually called '(C)JPT_xxx' where xxx is an offset
into the
'real' catalog for the long filename.

For 'image' files, loopback is the way forward - a filesystem which is
stored as
a file can be mounted by using losetup(1) to connect the file to
/dev/loop0 and then mounting /dev/loop0 as if it were a device.  There
is potential for writing FSes for TBAFS, SparkFS - any takers for this?
It'd be nice to be able to see into my TBAFS archives on my RiscOS
partition :)

	Matt
	-==-
	PS> Excuse my horrible M$ Exchange client not quoting anyone
properly - I'm trying to fix this!
unsubscribe: body of `unsubscribe linux-arm' to [email-masked]

---

From: matthew <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 12:47:31 +0100

Jan Magnussen has just pointed out to me that LongFiles v2 is avaiable,
which uses a different '!!!!!Z!' file and the first six chars of the
filename, followed by '}' followed by the offset into the 'real'
catalog.

I'll try and make anything I do both v1 and v2 compatible.

If read/write support ever makes it into the ADFS fs, maybe a uADFS
module could be written to allow 'newbie' installation to be placed over
ADFS?  Suggestions?