On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 02:19:58AM +0200, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> 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.
vfat has never supported case-insensitivity when using utf8. You have to
pick either case-insensitivity, or unicode. If the kernel has changed the
behavior of vfat when using iocharset=utf8, this merely makes the problems
more explicit; it was already broken in various subtle ways before this.
> 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?
I don't think this will do any good. As James mentions, there have been
known problems with vfat+utf8 for years, that have gone unaddressed; I don't
think one more bug report will change things.
> - 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?
I don't think there's any way to detect at mount time whether a filesystem
*is* case-sensitive or not; if shortname=winnt will work around this
behavior, then we should instead probably use this as a default any time
utf8 is being used as the iocharset.
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
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