Re: MSDOS name conversion

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

osiris@cs.utexas.edu writes ("Re: MSDOS name conversion "):
> 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.

In practice, not so - if you know which packages are available it's
quite possible to guess which package is in which file most of the
time.

...
> 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.

That's what I'm planning.

>   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.

There's no need for this.  The automatic mangling is at once easier
and more reliable.

Ian.