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From: scott@statsci.com (Scott Blachowicz)
Subject: Re: Possible (re)convert from Linux - specific questions
In-Reply-To: wilko@yedi.iaf.nl's message of Mon, 18 Sep 1995 20:45:16 GMT
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Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 17:07:12 GMT
>>>>> "Wilko" == Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl>
Wilko> Because the FreeBSD people in a general sense consider MSDOS a necessary(?)
Wilko> evil. This means the focus of people qualified to hack filesystems is
Wilko> on things they consider interesting. Remember, this is a volunteer
Wilko> effort and people are therefore doing this in their spare time.
I understand that it is a volunteer effort (and a very good one at that),
but I've seen references to FreeBSD's becoming more popular (or
mainstream, whatever that means) and easier to install for more UNIX-naive
types. Given that and the market realities, it seems that lack of a
useable msdosfs is a real big minus. I can work around its lack without
any problem, but I'm not in the UNIX-naive camp and I know how to deal
with this stuff.
Scott> Any clues on how to get a useable 'msdos' file system setup?
Wilko> In general: you are most welcome to hack msdosfs into a more usable state.
Given the amount (i.e. zero) of experience I have doing driver, kernel or
file system work, I don't think my hacking would be welcome :-)). But, I
could volunteer to help test out new versions (AFTER I get my FreeBSD
partitions backed up :-)).
Actually, if there are a set of problems with the msdosfs that are known,
it would be nice to see them listed somewhere. If they aren't fixed for a
release, then I would expect to see big warnings (at least as prominent as
those for other file system types that are to be avoided for now).
Suppose I could go figure out how to have a talk with the gnats server at
freebsd.org and see what's in its db? I seem to remember poking around
the searcher WWW page there and not coming up with much although the
information would be pretty scattered. Is there a decent query interface
to the gnats db? or should I go sift through the mailing list archive
searcher on the WWW page?
--
Scott Blachowicz Ph: 206/283-8802x240 StatSci, a div of MathSoft, Inc.
1700 Westlake Ave N #500
scott@statsci.com Seattle, WA USA 98109
Scott.Blachowicz@seaslug.org