[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

der Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Wed Dec 24 23:10:34 CST 2008


> But do I really need the massive namespace clashing that case
> sensitive filesystems allow,

There is no clash, unless you think of lowercase and uppercase as "the
same" in some relevant sense.

Perhaps it's just the geek in me, but I prefer my filenames to be
opaque octet strings.  I don't quite have that (two octet values are
special), but I sure am a lot closer with a case-sensitive filesystem
than a case-insensitive one (which latter requires some kind of
character set decision, even if only an implicit one, since determining
whether two octet sequences are identical ignoring case is a
charset-specific operation).

> along with the unsolvable problems they can present?

It's a matter of what you're doing with it.  I prefer to live with the
unsolvable problems presented by case sensitivity than the unsolvable
problems presented by case insensitivity.  If I were using filesystem
names in different ways than I am, I might feel differently (in which
case my preferred choice of filesystem for that task would be
different).  As with programming languages, keyboards, sort algorithms,
etc, there is no one best answer, possibly except for "it depends".

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B



More information about the geeks mailing list