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Kernel 2.6.25 broke iPod support for me, but who to bug?



Hi.

While testing some updates to my gtkpod/libgpod packages I noticed that
I couldn't actually play any songs anymore from my iPod. Which worked
fine some weeks ago.

I traced the error back to a change in kernel 2.6.25: Apparently vfat
file system can now become case sensitive in some cases
("FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems,
filesystem will be case sensitive!") which the mentioned applications
are totally not prepared for. They try to access files with their name
in upper case, but since the default for vfat is "shortname=lower" this
doesn't actually work anymore for files and directories that have no
long name saved on the file system.

So my question now is where to file the bug and I would be grateful
for recommendations:

- kernel: I find it unlikely that the mentioned change was done without
  a good reason given its obvious behavioural change. So I guess the
  chances that it can be reversed are slim. But I might be wrong?
- hal/util-linux: Maybe it would be a good idea to mount case sensitive
  vfat filesystems with shortname=winnt in the hope that would disturb
  fewer users. It would have fixed the problem at least in my case,
  but I'm not so sure it would be the right solution for most cases?
- applications (libgpod in this case): The application could try to
  normalize the filename to lower case if it knows that it handles data
  on a file system that could cause problems like this. But that sounds
  like a awful lot of special casing to me.

Any ideas?
Any other examples of applications broken by this change?

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/


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