Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] 8.1

From: [email-masked] (John Ostrowick)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 15:46:54 +0200

>> anyone here tried to see what happens to netatalk when it talks to os8.1
>> with its hfs+ ? eg., file name length...?
>
>Although HFS+ does SUPPORT long file names (255 chars) in the filesystem,
>the MacOS itself does NOT support this feature yet.  So currently, there
>is no way to get/set a filename longer than 31 chars using the MacOS.
>Since no other OS reads/writes HFS+ volumes at this point, well, you can
>probably see where I'm going with this.

umm, surely the new finder will let you type out 255 character names?

>My bet is, however, that long file names on AFP volumes will require an
>updated version of AFP because the current AFP network requests probably
>don't have room for long file names, either.  That probably wouldn't be
>very hard to add to netatalk, but until it happens, Macs (even if they DO
>support long file names) will continue to get their short names.
>
>(I think that's the case -- a developer can correct me if I'm plain wrong
>-- I haven't looked at the code in a while.)

true. (i write lab software for the mac, so i know what you mean about the
255 pascal strings, 63 chars in a fsspec, etc).

____________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
[email-masked], +27 11 716-3783
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
Web site, ftp site and listserv all available at:
http://macaroni.cs.wits.ac.za/

---

From: Rob Newberry <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:12:32 -0500 (EST)

> umm, surely the new finder will let you type out 255 character names?

nope.

(and I'm not surprised, either -- it took dropping Copland and buying NeXT
before we got MacOS 8, which is really not much more than a new,
multi-threaded Finder.  It'll take Apple a while to revise the OS to
support 255-char filenames, including the Finder.  They have to deal with
the issue that the Finder has space for those names, but no other
applications no how to deal with them, so they'll need name-mangling --
otherwise, no app could see the long names (or if they tried to open them,
they'd crash).  this is a big mess for Apple to deal with.  don't think
it'll happen too soon.)

Rob