[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 24 Dec 2008, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> That's entirely iTunes' fault.

Or CDDB's fault.  The data entered there is very likely inconsistent.

> There is by this time *NO FUCKING EXCUSE WHATSOEVER* (pardon my French)
> for any modern application whatsoever to be case-insensitive on a
> case-sensitive filesystem.

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.  Or, as an alternative, it could hash all the names and use some
hokey filename database like the iPod uses.

Case-sensitive filesystems are a great example of something that works
really well for computers and really poorly for end-users.

Now, you want to see case-sensitivity bugs?  Try installing any Adobe
product on a case-sensitive filesystem.  They can't even reference their
internal components consistently.  I don't know of a single Adobe product
for the Mac that will run on a case-sensitive filesystem.

In short, for Apple to use ZFS as a boot filesystem, they'd have to have
it set to be case-aware (as opposed to case-sensitive) by default.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke < "There is great satisfaction in building good tools
Elgin, TX          > for other people to use."
USA               <                                     --Freeman Dyson