NT porting gotcha

Here's something worth paying attention to at some point along the
road. It's much better to think about this a bit in advance than to
patch it up after the fact.

Whenever the client or server gets ported to NT or its derivative du
jour, whoever does the port ought to remember that NT's filesystem is
not case sensitive.

This is an ongoing annoyance I have with using P4 in a mixed
environment. Someone changes a file called "BreakMe" to "breakMe",
checks in their change, and boom! a few hours later, some developer on
the other coast wonders why he can't build his code any more, even
though the automatd build acceptor flagged the latest change as OK.

This isn't a difficult thing to get right; it requires a few tens of
lines of code here and there to make sure that files get renamed
correctly on a handful of unfortunately popular platforms. For all
that P4 is excellent in other respects, the authors yet to fix this
bug, and I'd be happiest if Subversion never had this problem in the
first place :-)

        <b
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:06 2006