Re: [gmane.emacs.bugs] Emacs fails to start properly if the current working directory is on a vfat or ntfs filesystem

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>
>> Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:00:52 -0500
>> 
>> Does anyone here have a vfat/ntfs partition for investigating this bug?
>
> There's no need to investigate, as the problem is clearly evident:
> Windows-based filesystems don't allow certain characters in file
> names, and `*' is one of these characters.  So a file name such as
> `#*scratch*#20913s5z#' is not allowed.
>
> To properly fix such a problem, Emacs needs to know the type of
> filesystem of a file.  Then we could employ the same technique as the
> Windows port does now, but conditioned by the filesystem, not the OS.
>
> However, I don't think we have infrastructure for querying the file
> about its filesystem type, do we?

A similar problem would be filename completion.  We have separate code
paths for that in Windows/Unix I believe, even though on MacOSX, the
file system tends to be case insensitive, too (and normalizing utf-8
composed characters in some manner).

If we could design some sort of system call sequence that worked out
insensitivity/normalizing agnostic, this would mean that on a typical
GNU/Linux system which can mount various foreign file system types,
everything would work out according to expectations.

That would seem to be preferable to #ifdef and its ilk.  I think,
however, that stuff like the "\\" directory separator can be system
rather than file system dependent.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum