Comment 6 for bug 124480

On Sat, 7 Jul 2007, Nicolò Chieffo wrote:
> The ntfs filesystem in a default windows istallation has some forbidden
> characters such as : \ ? and others (I don't have the list) and is not
> case sensitive

No. NTFS doesn't forbid either. They are perfectly legal. This is a
Microsoft documented fact (see URL earlier). It's the WIN32 Windows
subsystem which forbids them.

> Using ntfs3g it is possible to create files with this names. Those files
> cannot be read in windows, without Windows Services for Unix.

No. Any application can access them if they use the POSIX Windows subsystem.
This was described in the Microsoft URL I sent earlier. WSU is just an
example.

> Well in my opinion you are talking as a very very advanced user

I'm the ntfs-3g lead developer, with over five years of extensive experience
on the NTFS field. I understand your points very well but there are millions
of other users who need to be understood as well.

> I'm instead trying to be near to a normal user which dual boots in
> windows and wants his files available to both windows and ubuntu.
> (this is what the spec is aimed for, read Use Cases)

I actively participated in the spec since the beginning ;-)

> I understand that windows forbidden characters is legal in the NTFS
> filesystem at all. But they are not legal in a normal windows
> installation,

I try to explain the situation in a simple way. Suppose you download a RAR
file on Linux but you don't have unrar. Then you would start arguing that
Linux shouldn't allow downloading RAR files because they can't be unrarred
by default. Would this make sense? Not much. The same is happening with
POSIX NTFS. Any program could handle it on Windows if they wanted. But since
people don't complain thus the vendors don't fix it. What you're arguing
now is that let's break Linux too.

> 1) which partition is normally ntfs?
> My answer: the partition where windows resides and maybe another
> partition in which documents, videos, music, downloads are stored. For
> sure not / or $HOME...
> 2) which applications are normally used over a ntfs partition?
> My answer: openoffice, gedit, totem, nautilus, rhythmbox, firefox
> (vim, cat, less, diff, <, > for more advanced users). I cannot think
> of other apps now. what would not work in these applications if the
> filesystem is not POSIX? Tell me if I forgot something.

NTFS is already used for / and $HOME, consequently with any softwares
unless the lack of some driver feature is a showstopper (e.g. shared
writable mmap).

> I told you it was an unexpected change and I was using vfat as a
> reference because (I think) most normal users were using vfat to
> exchange files, and now that ntfs3g is out will for sure switch to
> this. But (I think) they expect it works the same way as vfat, because
> in windows there is no difference, and because they know they are
> using a windows filesystem which has restrictions in windows default
> installation. If it behaves differently they might face lots of
> problems and most users will not understand which is the problem.

NTFS-3G is in use for almost a year, probably even by over a million users
now and there are about only one POSIX related confusion per months.

Anyway, the source is yours, you're free to fix, enhance, use, distribute and
support it. If people really need these features then they will use it.