Thursday, April 9, 2009

Another Reason Why FAT32 / VFAT Needs to Die

In addition to being an out-of-date filesystem which Microsoft is suing companies over left and right, FAT has some other serious limitations, one of which is a 4GB file size limit. I'm sure at some point, Bill Gates said "4GB ought to be enough for anybody." ;) Other filesystems which are similarly limited include HFS and ReiserFS.

If you try to use Nautilus or even cp to transfer more than 4GB to a VFAT fileystem, the transfer fails and leaves a large (4GB) pile of poo which you need a damn big pooper scooper to pick up. The bug relating to file transfer failures is years old and shows no signs of being resolved, other than just closing it and marking as "invalid." O_o A better man than I says:
No, no, no, don't close it, fix it! There's 19 duplicates and something like 50 people watching this bug. I've finished my education, had two kids and changed jobs three times since I opened this bug in 2005. Can we please not just close it, but fix it instead by issuing an error message? Trying to do something that will never work should be considered a bug.
It's got to be less than five lines of code the right place:
if( targetdir.fstype == "FAT32" && file.size > 4GB ) {
   echo "Error: You are trying to copy a file larger than 4GB to a FAT32 formatted filesystem. FAT32 doesn't support file sizes larger than 4GB.";
   return 1;
}
 This bug, like many, is too difficult to solve unless we stop using VFAT altogether. Ahem.
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

No comments:

Post a Comment

Other I' Been to Ubuntu Stories

Related Posts with Thumbnails