[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

der Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Fri Dec 26 13:50:43 CST 2008


> If your application is using random binary strings as filenames, this
> is a bug.  They're file names, not file
> binary-object-locator-strings.

I thought you were just explaining how filesystems were really data
indexing applications.  Surely it's a bug if an indexing paradigm can't
handle arbitrary data?

>>> Pretty much every thing else is case insensitive.
>> So your argument is "the other way is popular" (and, from context,
>> "and is therefore right")?
> To the person sitting at the keyboard who is actually -using- the
> software (and not in a programming context), what are the benefits of
> a case-sensitive filesystem?

Speaking personally, "it works the way I expect".  Specifically,
different names are different, rather than a fuzzy matching scheme
leading to different names sometimes being effectively different and
sometimes not, depending on exactly what the difference is.

Obivously, this is not what everyone expects, which is an argument for
having each kind available, and for applications to be prepared to
encounter either (which latter is where we came in).

The only reason I can see to prefer either one, divorced from human
expectations, is that it's a lot easier for application-level code to
implement the case-folding (and necessarily charset-aware) paradigm
atop a charset-blind octet-string filesystem than the converse.

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