Re: Re-casing directories on case-insensitive systems

On Jan 11, 2008, at 8:30 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Apparently so. By Junio's definition, HFS+ is not a sane filesystem,
and as git grows more popular with OS X users, this issue is going to
crop up more frequently.

It's not "my" definition, but you asked the reason and I gave
the answer.  We can close this issue of "is HFS+ sane" now.
HFS+ is insane, period.  And as Linus said, you cannot forgive
its insanity using the historical baggage argument, like MS-DOS.

Fair enough, though I believe OS X has a good reason, namely it's an  
OS designed for regular users rather than servers or programmers. Case- 
sensitivity would confuse my mother.

HOWEVER.

It is a totally different issue if we want to refuse supporting
insane filesystems.  And the answer is no.  It was not my
intention to say that we do not intend to support them, when I
explained the reason why the things are as they are, which was
the original question by you.

Ok. I wasn't implying anything with that phrase there, I was just  
trying to reiterate that HFS+ is case-insensitive and emphasize that  
this issue will become more relevant as time goes by.

See Robin's proposal to let us translate random names we get
back from readdir() from the filesystem using an additional
look-up table in the index extension section that stores mapping
from canonicalized form to the form that the user registered to
the index.  I think that is a sane approach to tackle this issue
on insane filesystems like HFS+.

If I knew what the index extension section was, perhaps I would think  
that's a good idea ;) I have yet to dive into the gory details of how  
this stuff works.

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@sb.org
http://www.tildesoft.com