At 12:25 PM -0700 3/24/08, Jared Hardy wrote:
>On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> Karl Fogel wrote:
> > > "John M. Black" <johnmblack_at_gmail.com> writes:
> > >>
>> >> Please consider making Ignore pattern-matching case insensitive.
>> >>
>> >> OR at the very least, let the user choose. Maybe the easiest way to
>> >> do this is to keep the current Ignore property intact, and add a new
>> >> property "svn:ignoreNoCase". That way users can have it either way
>> >> for any item.
>> >
>> > How about a new property, "svn:Ignore", that means...
>> >
>> > Okay, sorry, bad joke.
>>
>> Actually I think it would make perfect sense to make mixed case in the
>> property name trigger case insensitivity in handling its values wherever
>> that would have any meaning. Unless you already have inconsistent
>> handling and accept mixed case names.
>
>While I like the amusing subtlety of the suggestion here, I think a
>lot of this discussion is ignoring the basics of good interface
>design. Useful defaults are very important to all interfaces, even
>command-line tools -- especially when appealing to a broad user base.
>Most (if not all) users try to avoid files having the same name with
>mixed case, and by the same token don't think about case when writing
>comparison rules. In Windows, they don't even really have a choice in
>the matter, so all features that favor case-insensitivity there should
>be enabled at all times, regardless of user preference.
Mac OS X (HFS+) presents an even more interesting case:
Case sensitivity is on a volume-by-volume basis, depending on how the
user chose to format the volume (HFS, HFS+, HFS+ Case-sensitive,
FAT32, UFS).
All API's use unicode for file names -- and HFS+ stores unicode names
in decomposed form and can be either case sensitive or case
preserving (but insensitive).
Perhaps what you really want is for ignore patters to obey the
semantics of the file system where the is stored by default.
While we're at it, it might also be worthwhile to have a way to
specify that a repository should be case-insensitive so that the user
gets a warning if they try to check in a file differing only in case
from an existing file (although move should be allowed to change the
canonical capitalization).
-Steve
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Received on 2008-03-24 20:45:36 CET