I just thought of something. We've already got these great *nix backup
tools, and it's be kinda nice to be able to use them all with vfat. So, if
we're going to do this by modifying tar or cpio, we would have several
tools to modify, and the end user would have that many more things to keep
track of. It wouldn't be hard to make it so they could use the modified
version for all their backing up, but then it just gets to be a pain, and
distributions (for example) might just start including only the vfat
version, and then we've got some more crud throughout the system to deal
with. And then someone else earlier mentioned how other filesystems have
stuff that needs to get backed up, so we might as well include code to
handle those filesystems. And in the end, it works, but we have some very
bloated, crufty, programs. So, why don't we have a small program to just
save (in the case of vfat) the 8.3 to LFN mappings via ioctl()s and then
we can use whatever backup tool we feel like. And if we have another
filesystem that has special attributes or whatever that need backing up,
we write a small program save those. Viola! No cruft, everything's cleanly
seperated so we don't have vfat stuff infecting Linux, and everyone's
backups are safe.
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