On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 06:36:37PM -0800, Andrew Crossley wrote:
> Hello NetBSD people,
> 
> The first thing I found on my system (AMD K6-II 400 Mhz, 128 mb, 3 x IDE HDs
> running i386) is that when I installed NetBSD from scratch using the GENERIC
> kernal, filenames on my cdrom were truncated (is that the right word?) to 8
> characters plus the extension.
> 
> e.g.  I burnt (using WinCrap) sys.tar.gz, config.tar.gz, and pkgsrc.tar.gz to a
> CDR so as to experiment with a more current kernal.  Using the normal base
> install, upon mounting the cdrom, the filenames became systar.gz, config~1.gz,
> and pkgsrc~1.gz respectfully.  I copied the files to the HD renaming them to
> their proper names.  I built a kernal using the RELEASE sources and the
> problem was still there.  Upon building a new Kernal from the 20/1/2000 sources
> the cdrom read the filenames properly.  I have examined the kernal config file
> in great detail, and can honestly say that apart from the udates to the new
> kernal config (31/12/1999) I did nothing that was different.

If you roasted the CDR under Windows, it will very probably have had
its long filenames specified in the "Joliet" format. A short explanation:
the most commonly used CD-ROM filesystem format is specified in ISO9660.
This defines a filename format of 8.3 (8 for the name, 3 for the extension).
Since this wasn't very suitable for Unix systems, the so-called "Rock Ridge"
extensions were defined, that enables long filenames in a backward
compatible way.

Somewhere later along the line, Microsoft, being Microsoft, came up with
its own version of long filename support, called "Joliet", which also
contains an extension for extended character sets.

1.4.1 did not support the Joliet long filenames. -current (to be 1.5)
does. Unfortunately, the patch was not pulled up into 1.4.2, I see now.
An unfortunate oversight, it was not a that big a change.

- Frank