FAT file names should be lower-case

[Martin Decky]

The file names read from FAT16 filesystem should be presented in lower case.

[Jakub Jermář]

Why?

The ECMA-107 spec for FAT16 explicitly mentions upper case letters. More precisely, it only allows d-characters, which do not contain, besides other things, lower case letters.

[Jakub Jermář]

I am going to close this ticket.
If you find a defendable argument why we should display FAT file names in a non-standard way, feel free to reopen the ticket.

[Martin Decky]

I have following reasons why I would prefer to see lower case file names on FAT16:

• It simply looks better and it does not harm (file name matching is case insensitive on FAT).
• Most of the time, users will type file names in lower case. Why not present the file names also in this way? Imagine tab completion in a shell — if the file names are upper case, the tab completion would either have to know about case insensitive matching or would require the user to start typing the file name in upper case to be effective.
• If you mount a plain FAT16 filesystem (without LFN) in Linux (2.6.28), you also see lower-case file names by default. You can specify other conversions via a mount option (which might be also our solution).
• On the other hand, in Windows (NT series) plain FAT16 file names are displayed in upper case. Windows use two special bits in the directory entry (called "lower case extension" and "lower case base name") to indicate whether to display each part of the file name in lower case. We can easily adopt these two bits to be compatible with Windows.

Note: I am really talking about the way file names are presented to the client applications. I do not propose to store the file names on the filesystem in lower case or in any other way conflicting the specs.

[Martin Decky]

OK, after some discussion in the mailing list I am closing this ticket again and replacing it with several other tickets, which are probably more specific and less controversial.

• lower case bits
• long file names
• FAT12, FAT32, FAT64
• "real" filesystem (e.g. ext2)