Re: Uppercase and lowercase in filenames

Branko Čibej wrote:

> A case-insensitive file system isn't "flawed", it just behaves slightly
> differently than a case-sensitive file system. You'd be quite as correct
> to say that a filesystem that allows newlines in file names is flawed.

A case-preserving but not case-sensitive file system is flawed as far as
most rational people are concerned. The two primary examples I am aware
of exist only because of historical inertia on the part of the platform
developers (fixing the problem would break their own software). It's
not the fact that the files system isn't case-sensitive, it is that
certain operations preserve case and others do not that makes it a flaw.

But as already pointed out, getting MacOSX and NTFS to change is not
something we can do anything about. I just wanted to point out that
there are two closely related issues that have to be handled better:

1) the server sending two files in the same directory differing only in
case;

2) the user [possibly inadvertantly] changing the case in the WC.

The former is poor planning on the part of the original committer(s)
(Perl had this problem for an 18 month period around the time 5.8.0 came
out), but the current Subversion client behavior is to simply stop the
checkout and refuse to continue at all.

The latter is a matter of working out how to recover from the
inconsistent state short of the current three step process which
potentially requires a massive (and unnecessary) update of the local WC.

My 2 cents...

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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