From: "Andrew Crabtree" <andrewc AT rosemail DOT rose DOT hp DOT com>
To: <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: LFN on NT
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 16:26:33 -0800
Message-Id: <01bcf54a$f4ad89d0$45111d0f@ros51675cra.rose.hp.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Precedence: bulk

Hello -

I'm not on the list so CC all replies please.

I've been giving a lot of though to the lack of the LFN API under Windows
NT.  It is particularly troublesome
for me now that I have found out that Clearcase (my version control system)
does not generate short file names at all
so that LFN files are basically invisible to DJGPP apps.

So, I've seen mention of some new LFN support for DJGPP, but it appears to
be for plain dos (no Win95) systems, not
NT.

Anyway, if nobody else is working on it, I have time.  I'm just not sure
what all will need to be emulated, as well as
if whether or not the approach I am thinking of is acceptable.

Here's what I have in mind.

In the startup code we can detect if we are running under NT or not.  Then,
if LFN is set in the environment we will
load in the nt-lfn DLL (this will need to be written).  We will then have to
have conditional code in most of the lfn and other file routines that either
call into the DOS LFN api or into the nt-lfn dll depending on whether we are
under NT or not.

The big problem with this approach is that it will require a dll to be
distributed with apps that intend to use LFNs under NT.  Aside from that I
can't think of any gotchas.

I haven't looked into modifying the libc code at all at this point.  All of
my testing has been done with standalone 16 bit
programs with NASM, and a test dll with dummy functions in it.

Any thoughts appreciated

Andy