[3553] in Release_7.7_team
Re-opening NTFS discussion?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Fri Oct 4 23:52:39 2002
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 23:54:04 -0400
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v482)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <1745AD5A-D816-11D6-B35D-000393995C5C@mit.edu>
In hallway chat on Thursday, I mentioned to Paul Hill that we'd
discussed a student request that Linux Athena add support for reading
NTFS, but had decided against doing so partly because Red Hat didn't
offer an easy means to do so, and partly because Red Hat's reluctance
was based on concerns over licensing.
Paul's take on the situation was that if we're consumers of the
software, not developers of it, it would provide an opportunity to
foster interoperability. If Microsoft made an issue of it, it would be
an opportunity to press them for a reason why we should not be
interoperating. ;-)
I consider such an enhancement as NTFS support under Linux Athena less
important than disconnected operation, but I feel it IS appropriate to
re-open the discussion and ask:
Where would the NTFS filesystem support module come from?
What is our estimate of the difficulty of adding it?
What is our estimate of the ongoing support to keep it in and working?
(Note, I've CC'd pbh to make sure he knows I'm quoting thim to
release-team, and to give him the opportunity to correct me if I've
mis-stated his position.)
-wdc
