2009/4/16 Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr:
On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Ben Klein wrote:
But his bug raises an interesting issue. If an application has sanity checks on FAT32 vs NTFS (e.g., I need a 4GB file ... I've detected no NTFS therefore it's FAT32 which doesn't support more than 2GB files),
Then the application is buggy: NTFS is not the only filesystem that supports >2GB files on Windows. Even if they are not very common, there are at leastt two drivers to use Ext2 filesystems on Windows (Ext2Fsd, Ext2 IFS), both of which support >2GB files. Besides if Microsoft ever changes the filesystem again, it will most certainly support >2GB files and the application will get it wrong again.
Usage of file systems other than FAT32 or NTFS on Windows is somewhere below negligible.
(Unless USB sticks really do go UDF to avoid a FAT tax, or something.)
So apps doing this may theoretically be sloppy programming, but in practice they'd pretty much always get the right answer on Windows.
- d.