Subj : Re: OS Programmers
To   : comp.os.linux
From : szcs
Date : Thu Aug 19 2004 08:21 pm

mjt wrote in message

> ... but NTFS is a moving target, so why should someone
> take their time to CONTINUE to reverse engineer it so

Nobody is reverse engineer NTFS for a long time. No need for it. NTFS
has changed only slightly over the last 10 years and the rewritten
Linux NTFS code works perfectly fine from NT4 through XP and 2003 to
even Longhorn beta.

The problem isn't the need to reverse engineering the new things
(there is nothing important) but to IMPLEMENT, under the GPL licence,
all the needed bits for FULL write support. NTFS is very complex. It's
said to be 20 times harder to implement than FAT32. Something like
Reiser4 or XFS. But only one or two guys are working on it and only in
their spare time. Versus 8-10 full-time paid engineers for Reiser4 or
XFS.

> that a few folks can R/W to NTFS from Linux?  

I doubt it would be only a few. A SUSE manager said recently in an
interview that half of their customers needs Windows compatibility.
I've heard even higher numbers for Mandrake. There are some hundred
million Windows users using NTFS and most won't throw away Windows
immediately but migrate gradually.

> there are two very good solutions for sharing data
> between Linux and winders:
> * create a fat32
> * use a virtual machine (or crossover)

  * Captive NTFS - doing the Wine way and it's free, GPL.
  * Paragon NTFS for Linux - commercial but I've never tried.

.