[maemo-community] Get the FAT Out

[From: timeless]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Erik Hovland <erik at hovland.org> wrote:
> After the TomTom noise, I wonder if there is any plan to get FAT usage
> out of maemo. At least as the default operating system.

That doesn't really make much sense.

The default filesystem in Maemo 4 is JFFS2, which is being replaced in
Maemo 5 by UBIFS.

Finally, these questions involve lawyers, and I'd request that you do
us all a favor and not bring it up in a community environment. Some of
us have to deal with lawyers more often than we like while working on
Maemo, and don't need the community giving us more headaches.

Note: FAT is the only interoperable file system for a number of
platforms. This is why most USB Mass Storage
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass_storage_device_class>
implementations use it.

Not all systems support MTP
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol>, and it
wouldn't shock me if someone complained about it given what is written
in that page.... Also, it has some really sucky limitations, you can't
really use it as a mountable file system (literally in Windows, and
technically to the extent that you can't seem to change your mind
about a file's size as you go....).

Would you rather USB networking
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_USB> ? because that
doesn't work out of the box with Windows, which means you couldn't
realistically use a web server as the "solution".

Alternatively, I can unsubscribe from this list and recommend that all
other Nokians follow suit. You *really* don't want to ask employees
who are trying to contribute to be forced to contact lawyers before
they join lists, read them, or contribute. And as to threats, there
are definitely cases where companies have ordered employees to either
leave lists or not join them because of lawyers.

Please please don't do this to us.

Sincerely,
A worried Nokian who doesn't like being forced off-of/out-of/away-from lists