Did i say it shouldn't? I was just replying to that "i've got 7 keen directories and am confused" guy
Where did I say I was confused? All I did say was that it doesn't work. Of course I know DOS itself does not support such path names but DOSBox does, and so does the frontend. If, despite the support for this, it doesn't work as it should, it's a bug. All I did was report this bug and Alexander, apparently being a much more user oriented dev than you are, perfectly understood the situation and tries to fix the bug so people can use the full functionality DOSBox offers with his frontend. Where's the problem?
For my reasons to use long filenames, there's two basic things to say. 1) Why the heck do you care? I'm a free person and If I want to use this feature offered by your programs I'm allowed to do so. 2) If you think it's such a stupid feature to have, why did you include it in DOSBox to start with. Go ahead and remove it, you'll make a lot of friends among your users.
But if you really need to know, the main reason I'm using the full game names is that, well, they are the full game names. How often have I heard you devs complain about bug reports using some weird abbreviation for a persons favorite game. I do not want to use shortened names that I can't remember anymore in a year or two (It was bad enough back in the day, even with the limited disk space). I also don't want to have to make up a different short name if the logical one is already taken by another game. Additionally, it's just a principal thing. I'm the maintainer of a video game database and accuracy is the nuts and bolts of such a project. I want the DOS game names from the database reflected 1:1 in my installation of those games.
Now, I could of course achieve all this in the frontend and still use short directory names the frontend points to. But (no offense Alexander), it's stupid to assume that any given tool will be here forever and if I ever have to leave DFRL behind and switch to something that doesn't offer an import for its database/profiles I'd be ****ed. My game directory though, with all the correctly named subdirectories will always be with me (yes, I have secondary off-location backups, the chance that I will lose the folder is very very low), allowing me to not be depend on a single tool.
But enough of this, I do not have to defend myself for using a given feature of your application.