Re: MSDOS name conversion

[osiris@cs.utexas.edu]

The thought of having to parse eight character file names makes me
cringe, but perhaps that's a personal peeve.  I like to be able to get
a reasonable idea of what's in the file from the name, and so far
that's usually been possible.  Having only eight characters would
change that.

I was going to oppose the names, the splitting, and everything, but
then I thought about what it would be like if you *had* to use DOS to
get this stuff, and/or didn't have a good internet connection, and I
realized I wasn't being fair, so...

I'm not so much opposed to the splitting, just the naming, so how
about this: Split the packages into pieces and give the pieces
suitably non-mangled, long names like emacs-el-19.29-4-1of2.deb etc.,
then put name mangled links to the fully named pieces in the msdos
sub-tree.  I know that there was some talk before about how to
automatically mangle the msdos names, but we could also just have the
msdos name be chosen by the package creator and stored with the other
package info, or stored in a separate map file.

I'm probably missing something...

--
Rob