Not just a habit, Harbour (and of course hbmk2) also supports
DOS, and potentially other such limited OSes/filesystems where
LFN isn't available. So in Harbour core we stick to 8.3 names.
Perhaps it is time to drop support for those limits. I cannot
imagine them pertaining to any development environment commonly in
use today?
This change would not stop anyone deploying to one of those OS's.
The only one I can think of would be DOS. I would say the situation
would be similar to cross-compiling for CE, I doubt anyone wants
harbour to run on CE, just to deploy harbour apps to it.
We allow to build Harbour on DOS, so it's not only a target
at this moment. We also allow to build apps on DOS. Our
target is still to keep Clipper compatibility and Clipper runs
on DOS. I can imagine users who wouldn't want to switch
directly to Windows/Linux, but first compile app for Harbour/DOS.
Some ppl may even need to run apps in pure DOS environment.
This also seems to be backed by sf.net download stats, where
our DOS downloads rank quite high (also to my surprise).
So for now I wouldn't agree to drop DOS support, just to
introduce one long filename extension, otherwise the 8.3
isn't very pressing for Harbour IMO.
Of course if other group members agree to drop DOS support,
or partially drop DOS support as a build platform, we can
do it. I personally don't need it.
However we decide IMO there should be a pretty pressing need
to introduce long extensions for our few basic file types, for
me they look very strange in most cases, and in case of hbmk2
I most probably wouldn't use them. We will see, maybe there
are some other good 3 char choices for .hbm/.hbp/.hbt.
Brgds,
Viktor
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