[geeks] Weird MacOS issue

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 26 Dec 2008, der Mouse wrote:

> (b) Which version of case insensitivity?  The ASCII version?  The
> 8859-1 version?  The 8859-7 version?  The UTF-8 version?  Something
> else?

In the case of HFS+, there is a field in the filesystem header
specifically to indicate this, whose value is set based on the user's
locale at the time of filesystem creation.

> (Unless you have a filesystem that can do case-sensitivity on a
> per-directory-entry, or at least per-directory, basis.  Do any such
> exist?)

I believe you can do this in ZFS.  Case-sensitivity is a property, and it
can be set on a per-filesystem case.  Given ZFS's fileystem granularity,
that's almost as good as per-directory.  It certainly puts things to the
level of per-workload.

> * Because a lot of applications have octet strings rather than
> character strings, and you can't case-fold octet strings without
> getting character set information from _somewhere_ to turn them into
> character strings.  This means either guessing (which will involve
> guessing wrong a fair bit) or imposing yet another one-size-fits-all
> "solution".

If your application is using random binary strings as filenames, this is a
bug.  They're file names, not file binary-object-locator-strings.  Some
day, someone will have to type that filename at a terminal, and they
shouldn't need a character map to figure out how to type U+10442.

>> 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?

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