woods@eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods) (10/10/90)
In article <1990Oct6.033520.10133@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: > Not that we know of. A lot of our early development was done on systems > with the 14-char limit. One or two long-name-isms crept in when we were > doing our configuration stuff, but I *think* we've got those all cleaned > out now. There are two possible problems here, which would be especially evident if someone were trying to install a patch to an older version, on something like SCO UNIX. One problem is that SCO UNIX will not match a pathname where more than 14 chars are specified. I.e. if you have a file named "filibustering-", but a shell script or other programme refers to it as "filibustering-liberal", the file will not be found. For some reason the IEEE 1003.1 spec. allows both this, and traditional behavior, and of course the FIPS 151(?) standard specified this behavior. At least that's what I remember from a previous discusion. Anyway, even patching a version of C News with a few of the "long-name-isms" would not be exactly easy in this case. The other probelm, compounded by the previous one, occurs when one uses some fancy tool like SCCS or RCS (which desire to tack a couple of extra characters onto filenames) to track local mods to the code. (Of course such tools are also seriously hampered by the current build process and the use of subst.) -- Greg A. Woods woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP +1-416-443-1734 [h] +1-416-595-5425 [w] VE3-TCP Toronto, Ontario CANADA