John wrote:
>eric <eric <at> ehlarson.com> writes:
>
>
>>You feel that svn should have support for Windows file name case
>>insensitivity;
>>
>
>Yep ;)
>
>I think Win32 (and OS X?) support can only ever be seen as 'partial' until this
>is supported in the core.
>
>
OS X (as of 10.3) is now case-sensitive. Apple found that supporting
case-insensitivity in a file system that had Unicode name support was
very difficult; capitalization semantics vary too much from language to
language and locale to locale. It also helped eliminate some
interoperability problems.
>>the current developement team does not have an interest
>>in implementing this. If you were really interested in a partnership you
>>would work on some way to facilitate the implementation of that feature
>>rather than complain that Windows was being treated as a second class
>>citizen.
>>
>
>Which indeed I'm doing - despite the fact that I haven't worked in C for a
>decade, and my systems arn't configured to build SVN (but I am trying). We're
>not all C devs, remember.
>
>
Good.
>In fact C devs on win32 are rare these days. We're not just being difficult,
>contribution is not so easy on our platform (lib usage etc). Now if it was
>written in VB ;)
>
It sounds to me that the problem here is a unwavering adherence to a
particular operating system rather than pragmatic selection of the the
tool best suited for the job.
>Frankly, I've also heard it said that (to paraphrase) "No one mentions core
>case-insensitivity, so it's obviously not important". (see issue 667, 1495, 2010
>for examples of this) Whereas in fact, every time someone does ask for it, they
>get told (again paraphrasing) "Isn't not an issue on Unix. If you want it, do it
>yourself".
>
>That could sound hostile, and doesn't encourage constructive input. (I'm accused
>of 'complaining', and told 'if you really were interested in partnership you
>would ... facilitate the implementation'. And that's not paraphrasing).
>
I disagree completely with that viewpoint. The open source community
works by making a gift to you of the software; there is no contract for
support or implementation of features you want. If it sounds hostile to
you, you don't understand the community. That gift is exactly the
opposite; it is a giant welcome and act of inclusion. The people writing
this software saw a need and are addressing it, sharing their work and
by making the source code available are inviting you to use what they
have done and build on their work to make the product stronger.
>I do actually believe that the SVN dev community is more altruistic that you
>suggest - they're not just thinking me, me, me all the time, and they have a
>genuine interest in making the best possible system, for *all* platforms (my
>'equal partners' point was about platforms, not every user equally contributing
>to development, which is impossible).
>
Open source communities don't expect every user to contribute, but they
do expect that if a user wants a specific feature that isn't part of the
current community plan, that user will contribute. If they don't
contribute, well that feature couldn't have been that important after
all. I am not sure how a platform could be a partner here - how would
you establish a partnership with an operating system? It is the
community of users and developers that are in partnership. Some
companies (IBM, Red Hat, HP, Sun, Collabnet) have contributed to varying
degrees to that community, others have not. Some companies view it as a
threat to their business model and actively lobby Congress to outlaw it,
or bring legal attacks against it. But at the end of the day it is a
grass-roots partnership of individuals, not corporate entities or their
product 'platforms' that are in partnership.
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Received on Sun Jul 24 18:23:40 2005