[Mageia-dev] exfat support in Mga2

[andre999]

Michael Scherer a écrit :
> Le vendredi 03 février 2012 à 16:23 +0100, Kamil Rytarowski a écrit :
>    
>> Hello!
>>
>> What do you think of support exfat in Mga2?
>> There are two packages (already in Debian, Fedora, partly Mandriva)
>> exfat-fuse and exfat-utils both iinm shall land in tainted.
>>      
> Why ?
>
> if it went to Fedora, it should be good enough for core/
> ( now I do not see it on F16, so maybe you mean something else than "in
> Fedora repository" when you mean "in Fedora" ).
>
>    
The wikipedia page links to https://code.google.com/p/exfat/
which gives links for various distros which have these exfat packages.  
(7 in all)
The link for "fedora" is http://code.google.com/p/exfat/downloads/list, 
which is evidently not on Fedora itself.
For debian it is to http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/exfat-fuse
For mandriva it just says "Cooker" (no link).

The wikipedia link 
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Licenses-Windows-7-s-exFAT-Flash-File-Format-129512.shtml
says that Microsoft licenses the format to larger companies for 300000$, 
and a search from there leads to 
"http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/intellectualproperty/iplicensing/programs/exfatfilesystem.aspx"
So it does have to be in "tainted".  (Unless, of course Microsoft 
decides to give us special permission :-) )

The filesystem only seems to be useful for usb keys 64G or bigger, since 
the format is essentially a FAT64 with minor innovations.  It is the 
default format for SDXC cards (>=64G).  For other contexts, ext4 (or 
even NTFS) would be a better choice,

-- 
André