Re: Long (font) filenames

[Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@astrid.u-net.com>]

[snip]
>Your approach of making subdirectories out of long names is interesting.
>But I fear it runs afoul of the ISO-9660 limitation of 8 directory
>levels.  Also, directory names with extensions are not valid in ISO-9660
>even though they work on old MS-DOS filesystems.

I personally wouldn't worry too much about keeping the directory tree
limited to 8 levels, because you don't absolutely *have* to use a
distribution off a CD-ROM; it can, as you point out, be installed on HD and
used from there.  I expect there are plenty of people using computers
without hard disc drives even now (me, on occasion), but no hard disc
probably means no CD-ROM either.

[snip]

>Long filenames are obviously a good thing, but whether they'll get
>widely adopted in the TeX world soon, I don't know.  Many people do put
>out files with non-8.3 names already.

A few non 8+3 filenames are out there, but the numbers are small in the TeX
world even though a large proportion of TeX stuff is developed on Unix
boxes.  I think the only significant stash of files at CTAN which exceed
the 8+3 limitation are in the systems/mac part of the directory tree, and
this is acceptable because you can't use those files unless you have a Mac.

As I've said before and will say again (most likely on a regular basis for
at least the next decade), lots of people still use MS-DOS out of necessity
(often people in poor countries using obsolete computers because of lack of
money).  I'd be happy with dropping the 8+3 limit if a way of exceeding
this limit was freely available to all MS-DOS users.  If no such thing has
been developed by 2010, I expect I'll have dropped my objections to
exceeding 8+3 (20-odd years after a computer has become obsolete is
probably long enough to consider dropping all pretence of support).

Note that I don't have a DOS box myself.  I can't imagine any reason for
allow such an abomination into the house under any circumstances.  But I
*do* have a small stash of ancient Macs; I have discovered there are lots
of people still using the original 68000 Macs (the Classic Macs mailing
list is the home of these perverts) which are comparable in terms of
computing power to 8086 and 80286 PCs.  Although ancient Intel PCs are less
attractive than ancient Macs (try running Win 3.1 on a 640K 8086...), I
can't see any reason for them to be abandoned completely.

>I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from all this :-).
>Except maybe that there's no one answer.

Probably.

Rowland.

P.S.  I dropped the fontinst list from the distribution because I suspect
everyone on the fontinst list is subscribed to the tex-fonts list.