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Subject: Re: vfat patch for shortcut display as symlinks for 2.4.18
From: Nicholas Miell <nmiell@attbi.com>
To: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>
Cc: Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>,
        Jan Pazdziora <adelton@informatics.muni.cz>, christoph@lameter.com,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, adelton@fi.muni.cz
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Date: 09 Jun 2002 16:45:57 -0700
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On Sun, 2002-06-09 at 15:05, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> Nicholas Miell writes:
> >> [ insane abuse of VFAT for multi-user systems ]
> >
> > You're not serious, right?
> 
> I'm very serious. The ability to install without partitioning
> is important for hesitant new users.
> 
> Why not? The system might feel "unclean" to you, but it's
> great for converting the Windows users. Not many people
> are willing to trash their one-and-only partition, full of
> data, to experiment with a new OS. Regular users don't
> keep backups. Linux is the only UNIX-like OS that could
> do a respectable job of running multi-user on vfat.

The same thing can be (and is) done using initrd+loopback, with a lot
less effort and all of the usual Unix filesystem semantics.

- Nicholas

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