On 8/19/05, Evan Stark <EStark@point-inc.com> wrote:
> > It's not a solution at all, because that would mean windows clients can
> > no longer communicate with unix servers and vice versa.
>
> Question I've always wondered, does anyone ever really name two different
> files with the same name but different case? What's the scenario?
I haven't seen this happen on purpose, but it does happen as others have described.
At my previous job we used Perforce. We snuck it in on a Linux server, which didn't care about case. Folks would pass around files (build.bat, Version.txt) and check it in with a different case for whatever reason. So we had a bunch of instances where the same directory had Version.txt and version.txt, build.bat, Build.bat and BUILD.BAT. In many cases the files were the same and folks just checked them in for basically no reason, but that's how the tree ended up.
So IT finds out we have a Linux server and makes us get rid of it. Perforce uses BDB and stores the archives in a sort of in-place tree, so you can imagine what happened when I zipped that baby up and tried to unzip it on a Windows server. Well, maybe you can't imagine if you haven't used Perforce. Basically, the checkpoints did not match up to the tree (version.txt overwrote Version.txt, etc.) so there were many cases of missing files.
So, it does happen, but usually not on purpose.
Another curious thing I have come across is MS Visual Studio 6 allowed you to add files to a project with case sensitivity in tact. You could, for instance, add StdAfx.h and stdafx.h to the same project, and it would let you. In some cases the two files were in different directories and worked fine. One time (and this drove me nuts for a long time before I figured it out) the files were in the same directory, and one would constantly overwrite the other. You could also, at the time, have same-named files in differend projects, pointing to the same real filesystem file, with one constantly overwriting the other. I seem to recall (this was some years ago) that this was partially a side effect of the MS SCCS integration with ClearCase. It was basically a big mess, but in most cases not a nutty developer, per se.
-Matt
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Received on Fri Aug 19 19:36:52 2005