Yet another Case-Insensitive File System Problem

While working on my copy of the converted Perl repository, I discovered yet
another problem with case-insensitive files systems. When Unicode support was
added to Perl, the core routines were added under lib/unicode/. Later on, a
userspace module was added, under lib/Unicode/; this was recognized as a problem
under NT and OS/X 10.x and the lib/unicode directory was renamed lib/unicore.
This is even though the actual files stored in the directories are unique.

However, it seems that under Perforce, like CVS, empty directories still persist
in the repository. Consequently, it is impossible to check out the entire Perl
repository under NT at any point where both directories exist (svn refuses to
continue the checkout), like today. I can recreate the subversion repository
and delete the offending directories at the point in time where the rename
occurred, but it still means that there exists a window of revisions where
checkout is impossible under NT and OS/X.

The current subversion behavior, i.e. just refusing to continue, is suboptimal.
  At the very least, there should be a way to just force a checkout, which
should merge the directories in the wc (as long as the actual filenames don't
conflict in a case-insensitive way).

The rub, of course, is what to do with files that need to be committed, that are
located in those merged directories, since the entries and text-base cannot
really be merged. I suppose the second directory could be added to the entries
file and then the files located therein could be flagged with a property that
would clue svn to handle those files differently when committing. That smells
very bad to me, and I doubt that it will fly with the list as well... ;~)

In any case, should I create an incident to track this as a post-1.0 task?

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
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