Re: How to fix issue #4023 (on Windows, 'svn rm missingItem' deletes the unversioned 'MissingItem' from disk)?

Johan Corveleyn wrote:
> Ok, but in the svn working copy, even on Windows, we can have a valid
> fILE.eXT in wc.db, while there is an unrelated file.ext present on the
> filesystem. We should be able to do useful things with the svn item
> fILE.eXT in one way or another, without harming file.ext.

Excuse me for jumping in here, but why do you say 'file.ext' is 'unrelated'?  Normally on Windows, if an application or user asks about 'fILE.eXT' and there is a 'file.ext' on disk, the user expects the application to open the existing 'file.ext'.  In other words, that file on disk has *the same name* as the file I'm talking about, by definition, because the definition of file name handling on Windows is case-insensitive.

I know that Subversion doesn't strictly have to behave like a standard Windows app.  So...

What filename casing rules do we want Subversion to follow on Windows?

We haven't chosen to behave like a case-insensitive Windows app, it seems, and obviously(?) we can't be fully case-sensitive when the underlying Windows APIs are not.  The rules we choose must govern how we fixed all the case-related issues (#3702, #3865, #4023 at least).  We can't classify this issue as a "bug" and "fix" it until we define what behaviour we want.

>> We can never 100% emulate a case sensitive filesytem on a case
>> insensitive one.
>
> Heh. But we can still try to emulate it as good as possible :-).

But seriously?

- Julian
Received on 2012-01-23 15:24:58 CET