On (28 Oct 99) Leonard Erickson wrote to Peter Knapper...

Hi Leonard,

 LE> At least until and unless OS/2 gets support for Win95 style
 LE> long file names.

 PK> NO!!! We certainly DONT want a kludge like that thank-you!

 LE> Admittedly, it's a kludge. But it's also *common*, which means we need
 LE> to be able to import and export it.

 LE> It'd also be nice if OS/2 could "borrow" a trick from Netware. Netware
 LE> creates an 8.3 "alias" so that DOS programs *can* access such files.
 LE> The problem is that the name is neither predictable nor "settable" (at
 LE> least in my version of Netware).

 LE> By "settable", I mean that I can't assign a *specific* 8.3 name to a
 LE> file *and* keep the long name. Something like the Unix trick of
 LE> pointing multiple directory entries at the same name would be the best
 LE> answer. I forget what the Unix command is.

Personally, I like the GEOS (Geoworks Ensemble 2.x or New Deal Office)
way of doing long/short filenames better.  It uses the first 8 letters,
with an underscore substituted for spaces, and then uses a numerically
incremented suffix to differentiate. Either way, the files remain
accessable from within GEOS or DOS or any other OS out there.  The same
is done for directory names, so directories are also visible.

An example is a document called Christmas Letter 1997 and Christmas
Letter 1998.  These would be called CHRISTMA.000 and CHRISTMA.001,
repectively.  A directory called My Documents would be called
MY_DOCUM.000.

This behaviour is predictable.  Admittedly, one cannot always tell which
document is which, but from within the GEOS environment, one can pull up
the file properties and see what the DOS filename for the file/directory
is.


TTYL,

Stephen
Team OS/2, Team GEOS
OS/2 & New Deal Office 98 - A great combination.

... Proverbs 3:5 | ... and lean not unto thine own understanding.

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