Re: Fixing the lisp/loaddefs.el situation

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 18:50:38 -0400
> From: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
> 
> Are we still supporting 8+3 filesystems?

Yes, AFAIK.  At least I don't recall any decisions on dropping that
support.

> I ran `doschk' and it reports a bunch of violations for emacs

Which ones, please?  I know about 2 files in lisp/mh-e, which I
reported to the maintainer and was told it will be fixed well before
the current HEAD goes into pretest.  If there are others, please tell.

> certainly we could fix them, but it seems worthwhile to consider
> whether it's worth the trouble anymore.

Since the support of 8+3 systems currently doesn't impose any
significant maintenance burden, I'd advise not to drop it yet.

Please also note that, due to quirks in the way Windows generates
short 8+3 aliases for long file names and supports both long and short
names in the same session, with certain system configurations
loaddefs-bootstrap.el and loaddefs.el could both point to the same
file even though there are no 8+3 limitations in the filesystem; thus
copying the former over the latter could overwrite the original file.
(The default Windows configuration should not have this problem, but
there are options in the Registry which, when set, can lead to such
problems.)  So keeping file names 8+3-unique is a good idea even if we
drop support for building Emacs on pure DOS machines.