I decided to not deal with 8.3 filesystems (especially with documentation).
It makes it a pain to downgrade stuff to conform to 8.3. I think
a reasonable decision for freeware.
It's something of a question as to whether you consider your
potential host population to extend to NT, or to Win95. There
are enough problems with long file names on 95 so that the Ap may
wish to take charge by downshifting to 8.3 as a preventive
measure.
I think the issue is documentation. MHonArc is old enough that it was
used with 8.3 systems and it worked. Some of the .pl filenames are not
8.3, but are still unique when clipped to 8.3 and Perl seems to handle
it okay. I think the current complaint was against the documentation
and not the execution of mhonarc itself.
As for documentation, I have no desire (or time) to conform it 8.3. I
have scripts that help create/update pages (mainly the resource
reference section) from a mhonarc resource list file, and creating
xrefs between pages are intuitive when the pages are based on resource
names. Since the documentation practically takes as much time as
coding, I do not want to add an extra burden on doing the docs to
support antiquated filesystems.
Although it is not the best solution for many, I do make the
documentation set available from the mhonarc home page so users
can still access the docs if they have problems on their local
system.
--ewh
