[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Dec 26, 2008, at 01:39 , der Mouse wrote:

>> Except that, to work around errors in the CDDB data, the application
>> itself would have to treat the underlying filesystem as
>> case-insensitive by globbing the other-case variant of each character
>> when trying to find a file.
>
> Why?  Why should it do that any more than it should match up a Def
> Leppard track with some fool's mis-identification of it as Deaf
> Leopard?

Because matching case insensitive would be correct, matching a  
different word would be either in error, or impossible for a computer  
program to determine.

> And, if it should, why is it the underlying filesystem's job to
> implement that?

Good question, and one answer:

A filesystem is an indexing system, and most indexing systems are  
caseless.

Why not implement it there?

Why should each application redundantly and probably in error prone  
fashion handle something that could be done once as part of the system  
and application support?

A filesystem is both an API and a human interface.

Traditional UNIX filesystems are almost the only data indexing system  
that is case sensitive.

Pretty much every thing else is case insensitive.



-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com