Comment 70 for bug 344878

I accidentally hit this bug today.

I think the filename length limitation in current file systems is ridiculously low. Look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits

You can create single files of multiple Terabytes and Exabytes but their names will be limited to 255 bytes, which means less than 255 characters if you need to use Unicode. As to comment #12, a song's or book's filename could be a lot longer than that.

The only practical Linux file system that seems to support significantly more is ReiserFS/Reiser4. Btrfs is stuck at insane 255 bytes.

As there is no quick fix on the horizon, I will switch to Reiser4 (and do more frequent backups and send a kind letter to Hans...)

John, please think about the -o i-have-been-warned-about-missing-xattr mount option when the lower filesystem lacks xattr support. Still, I somehow see trouble coming for unsophisticated users who do not know xattr. Also, not all user space software treats xattr well.

Thank you for encryptfs, it is one of my favourite features when combined with pam.