Talk:Rock Ridge

Fix Request

Would someone please fix the sentence "the long file names are argued to look better in Windows" preferably by being specific about the advantage of using Rock Ridge to create a disk that is to be read on a Windows system. Also, Microsoft says they do not support Rock Ridge format in Windows XP (is this correct? what about others versions of Windows?) so this statement is even more confusing. Thank you in advance; I really want to understand this. - TSloth

ASCII?

As I understand it, Unix filesystems don't specify "ASCII", or any other encoding. The '/' character, and probably the '\0' character are disallowed, but any other filename is just a sequence of bytes, to the kernel. This means you can declare that your system uses UTF-8 for filenames, as long as all your programs agree on this. Is my understanding correct?

So what does "almost any ASCII character" mean? Any but '/' and '\0', which means UTF-8 is safe on ISO-9660? Or are there other exceptions, which force ASCII-only?

When I read this article, I'm more interested in what Unix features it doesn't support, not what features it has that ISO-9660 doesn't. So here's my attempt at a list:

• filenames limited to ASCII (does it?)
• no hard links (correct?)

(Please correct me if I'm wrong or incomplete anywhere.)

The only bytes disallowed in filenames are '\0' and '/', and it is suggested that you create your Rock Ridge structures in UTF-8, although it is not required.

Hard links are supported even in pure ISO 9660. This allows you to create images that look like they are bigger than they actually are. You can try this using mkisofs, just create an image of a directory with hardlinked files inside.

--Miles July 1, 2005 16:21 (UTC)

POSIX-compliant filesystems, of which Rock Ridge is one, allow all byte values except 0x00 (null, the string terminator) and 0x2F (slash, the directory separator), though the OS may impose additional constraints, and using control characters in filenames is a bad idea in general. So all of the ISO-8859-* and EUC-* encodings are safe, and UTF-8 is so too. In fact, UTF-8 was invented because neither UTF-16 (with its arbitrary byte values) nor the obsolete UTF-1 (which can have 0x2F in its multibyte sequences) were POSIX-safe. Rock Ridge, then, supports Unicode by way of UTF-8, the only disadvantage being that the use of UTF-8 encoded characters can cut down the number of maximum characters for the filename (by a factor of three if the name is comprised entirely of characters above U+0800). --46.117.126.205 (talk) 20:44, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Merge

Should be merged with ISO 9660 — Claunia 22:59, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

I disagree: there's a lot more information on the extension that this article could use, and that would make it too large for the ISO 9660 article. I think each extension should be fleshed out and put in a common category. -- Jon Dowland 13:48, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

One of the few programs that can edit and preserve CD images with Rock Ridge filesystems

"ISO Master, one of the few programs that can edit and preserve CD images with Rock Ridge filesystems"... huh? The very popular GNU/Linux program K3B will happily work with RR, and other GNU/Linux tools too. --Skypher (talk) 19:09, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Trivia

I once read the name of this standard came from the town in the movie Blazing_Saddles#Plot, but I'm not sure if this is a fact. • Sbmeirow • Talk • 22:36, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

My contribution about zisofs: Too much original research ?

I made changes to this page concerning the external links about AAIP, of which i am the inventor, and the field ZF, which H. Peter Anvin invented and implemented in Linux. Nevertheless i am the author of the written specification (years after Linux implementation) and the libisofs wiki to which i added an external link. - Thomas Schmitt, july 27 2017