Re: MAXNAMLEN vs NAME_MAX

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 05:50:56PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
 > > > I was recently talking to some people who'd been working with some
 > > > (physicists, I think) doing data-intensive simulation of some kind,
 > > > and that reminded me: for various reasons, many people who are doing
 > > > serious data collection or simulation tend to encode vast amounts of
 > > > metadata in the names of their data files. Arguably this is a bad way
 > > > of doing things, but there are reasons for it and not so many clear
 > > > alternatives... anyway, 256 character filenames often aren't enough in
 > > > that context.
 > > 
 > > It's only my opinion, but they really should be using multiple files or
 > > a database for the metadata with as necessary a "link" to an actual
 > > file for data.
 > 
 > Or use '/' to separate the fields in their long filename :-)
 > (But then they'll hit the 32k/64k limit on subdirectories ...)

This actually doesn't work that well if you ever use mv or cp on some
or all of the data files.

 > Thinks...   MD5 hash the user-specified filename and use that for
 > the 'real' name. Add some special fudgery so that readdir() works.
 > Then use some kind of overlay mount.

Sounds like Windows long filenames...

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost