Description of Problem:

I'm caught between worlds and it's incredibly painful.  I "need" to be able to
access the same files from windows and linux.  I also "need" unix filesystem
semantics because I think unix.  I submit to redhat's marketing sensibilities
that my "needs" are on the critical path for organizations that could be
adopting linux in a piecemeal fashion but do not because it's too painful. 
other markets are dual-boot users (that's me) and cross-platform-developers
(could be me...why don't you get me an interview?)...

I used to love umsdos filesystem support but that got tossed out when vfat and
long filenames came around.  seems like a real waste to me because umsdos
filesystems needed a bit of synchronization with the underlying fat16 filesystem
but provided the TREMENDOUS ADDED VALUE of full support fo unix filesystem
semantics....  including symlinks and linux uids and whatnot.

now i'm trying to make a dual-boot system that gives me filesystem consistency
between winme/cygwin and linux.  it seems that cygwin treats read-only .lnk
files as symlinks (there's GPL source code available for inspection) but linux
does not.  The vfat support does not sufficiently embrace-and-extend win32
filesystem semantics...  cygwin does better, and umsdos did best.  cygwin and
linux-vfat don't even agree on upper & lower case mapping...

umsdos _was_ roughly speaking, a good solution but it's seemingly been dormant
since 1998 and none of the major vendors ship the umsdos-tools package so it's
effectively been dumped...along with anyone who depended upon it.



Expected Results:

i expect that the linux kernel, cygwin, and samba will all adopt a uniform
method of mapping unix filesystem behavior onto win32 filesystems to ease
migration for those caught between the two worlds.


steps: 
   1. support the same hack for symlinks that is supported by cygwin
      (i think it's .lnk files that are marked read-only)

      1.a. export this hack to samba so that <unix - samba - windows - cygwin>
           "does the right thing where possible" (samba follows symlinks 

   2. adjust default vfat support mount flags to provide the best results on
         cp -a <unix-dir-tree> <vfat-volume>
         diff -r <unix-dir-tree> <vfat-dir-tree>
      (a common problem is that short filenames get mapped wrong CVS != cvs)

   3. update umsdos to incorporate vfat support and hack it into cygwin and
      samba (samba would auto-generate) the umsdos-ish meta-data file as an
      "upgrade" to whatever downgraded directory information it just served 
      up for SMB


1 is high-utility low-hanging fruit
2 is a potential testing hassle but also of HVLH potential
3 is DWIM nirvana for the interdimensional traveller 
  (with the SMOP addition of linux software suspend aka hibernation...
  i've seen patches in FOLK)

-- stig