Re: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS.

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 10:44:52AM -0400, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> You know this problem was "solved" over 20 years ago when it was
> discovered that file-names could never be long enough. The solution
> was a container-file which contained as much stuff as necessary to
> identity the contents of the file that it was associated with. Using
> this technique, the "real" file didn't need any ASCII identifiers. The
> real file didn't show up in some directory program, just the contents
> of the container-file. This same technique could be used for any
> arbitrary file-identification including characters that haven't been
> invented yet.

Why am I suddenly reminded of apple's idiotic filesystem forks for
resources and data?  Such a pain when trying to transfer files to other
types of filesystems.  Modifying the files themselves also doesn't seem
like the right solution.

As for filenames never being long enough, I don't think that is true.
Filenames CAN be too long, but I don't see very many people think 250
characters makes for a useful filename.  Most people seem happy with 50
or so being a good limit even though many systems support much longer.
8 wasn't enough, and 25 or 30 was sometimes a bit short, but usually
enough.  Not having enough filename length doesn't seem to be a problem
in need of a solution on most systems anymore.

Len Sorensen