Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 11:46:20 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Andris Pavenis cc: Laurynas Biveinis , djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Announce: LBInstDJ the DJGPP installer v0.2 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Andris Pavenis wrote: > We must seriously think whether to enable NameNumericTails=1 under Win9X > permanently as this have some rather nasty side effects that can > even cause data loss in some situations. I have once suceeded to > overwrite file I didn't want to do when NameNumericTails=1 were > enabled I'm aware of such cases, they happen in Windows 95 as well. However, IMHO it's a GOOD THING that they happen, because such files should *never* be in DJGPP distributions, or else those who do have numeric tails disabled will experience problems which the developer/porter of the package didn't see and didn't solve. There's no magic here: files like Makefile.in.in get Makefile.in as their short 8+3 alias, and so could potentially overwrite an existing Makefile.in file in the same directory. It's a bug in Windows. The right way to deal with these cases is to use tools which, like djtar, alert you to files that are going to be overwritten. A fair amount of vigilance is also required. But such efforts don't come anywhere close to the mess you have on your hands if you do NOT disable numeric tails and need to use short file names. > Another example is libg++ tests for egcs-1.1.2 (also gcc-2.8.1 should have > the same problem but I have not tested it) in directory > libg++/etc/PlotFile3D (File $DJDIR/lang/cxx/PlotFile.h conflicts > with libg++/etc/Plot3D/PlotFile3D.h in egcs112s.zip when > NameNumericTails=1). There's more than one way of solving these problems, once they are discovered. But if the problem is not discovered, it will never be solved. I understand that this particular problem will also happen on non-LFN systems, so it must be solved anyway. > Due to these problems I removed NameNumericTails=0 from registry. It is IMHO unfortunate that instead of solving the problems in the original distribution and thus make it usable for more people on more platforms, you have chosen this easy way out. This way we will never have distributions that are clean on both LFN and non-LFN platforms. Moreover, they won't be clean even on LFN platforms that disable numeric tails. Therefore, I urge you to reconsider.