Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Long file names?

From: "Harry Zink/Netatalk List" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 09:04:18 -0700

>>> Files with filenames longer than 31 characters don't show up when I
>>> look at a netatalk shared directory on my Mac. Is this usual?

Are there any plans or ideas to address this?

I guess with OS X this will be moot, as it will recognize 256 char
filenames, but still, I'm wondering if anything even can be done before
that?

Harry

---

From: Rob Newberry <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 12:50:38 -0500 (EST)

> filenames, but still, I'm wondering if anything even can be done before

OS X will not really fix it in this case -- the basic problem is that it
requires an update to the AFP specification to correctly handle long file
names.  I don't know what Apple's plans are for future AFP versions...  Of
course, OS X, since it's based on UNIX, should have NFS built in, so you
could do things that way. 

And to be completely honest, AFP as it stands CAN handle 255-char file
names, but the client on the Mac, and most Mac programs including the
Finder, cannot deal with such file names, and will likely crash.  It
really requires a new set of APIs for servers to provide long file names
as well as short equivalents for old programs.  OS X will not make all
these programs suddenly better -- it just means that when they do crash,
the whole Mac system won't go down with it.

Given that HFS+ supports long file names via UNICODE, I would expect that
whatever revision is made to the AFP spec will not define long file names
in terms of what they are today (ANSI characters), but in terms of
UNICODE.  So someone will have to do the work to support conversion to
UNICODE to make the new AFP spec work.

Rob