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RE: Re: case insensitivity revisited

From: Brian Erickson <erickson_at_BAUERCONTROLS.com>
Date: 2006-10-26 19:03:11 CEST

When a tool creates a problem for the user, it's the tool that needs
'fixing' not the user. Sure, users can make mistakes and it's up to the
tool to point that out in a way that's easy for the user to understand.
Yes, the error messages need to give information to the developer as
well but it's the user that is most important here.

I'm just a user (new at that) of the Subversion tool so I can't comment
on how difficult it would be to change. However, I've been a developer
for a few years now and I know that if I'm careful, my code ports and
runs fine. I have never had any issues with my code matching the OS's
behavior when it comes to being case sensitive or not. It helps if you
know up front that your code will run on more than one OS but it is not
a requirement.

From the users point of view, having Subversion being case sensitive
when running on Windows is just something that needs to be addressed by
the developers and until that happens the users need to be aware of it
and work around it. Yes, I think it's a bug. Until I installed
Subversion, my system (Windows XP) was 100% case insensitive. Now, it's
only 99.9%.

Brian Erickson
Bauer Controls

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Armbrust [mailto:daniel.armbrust.list@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:41 AM
To: Ted Dennison
Cc: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: case insensitivity revisited

Ted Dennison wrote:
> James M. Lawrence wrote:
>> My own opinion is that case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystems
>> are conceptually broken when mixed with case-sensitive filesystems.
>> The problem is not the filesystem per se, but that there is no
>> enforced convention for tools which deal with the filesystem.
>>
> Mine remains that the user tools, when used on a case-insensitive
> filesystem, should be smart enough to recognize this fact and behave
> in a case-insensitive manner. Of course this is easy for me to say, as

> I'm a user, not a dev. Implementing this probably involves passing
> case-sensitivity information to the server on every single call, which

> would be a huge change.
>
>

This would just create a massive mess when you are going back and forth
between case sensitive and case insensitive platforms.

Seems to me that this is completely a user error.

You should not be relying on the case-insensitivity of a file system to
make your software work correctly. Be consistent with your file names,
and you wouldn't have a problem to start with.

Having subversion mangle things only passes the error farther down the
line, to the next user.

Dan

--
****************************
Daniel Armbrust
Biomedical Informatics
Mayo Clinic Rochester
daniel.armbrust(at)mayo.edu
http://informatics.mayo.edu/
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Received on Thu Oct 26 19:04:07 2006

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