Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred for Case-Insensitive File-Systems(www.phoronix.com)
12 pointsby Bender9 hours ago4 comments
  • BobbyTables28 hours ago
    Case sensitive OSes like Linux don’t mix well with case insensitive file systems.

    Take files under /boot/EFI (FAT). Packaging systems fall down on such — two RPMs can have different cases of the same filename and the package manager won’t know. They’ll just subtly overwrite each others file depending on installation/upgrade order.

    (And why should the package manager have to care about the case sensitivity of the underlying file system for each managed file?)

  • PaulHoule9 hours ago
    It's some kind of game theory game. If software and data is being transferred between Windows and Unix system it will be rare for Unix software to break on Windows, yet, Windows allow carelessness about capitalization which breaks when you round trip to Linux. Embrace, Extend, Exterminate, etc.
    • p_ing8 hours ago
      Windows can be configured to have whole-volume case-sensitivity with NTFS, or even directory-specific case-sensitivity.

      However, case-sensitivity is user-unfriendly. README.DOCX, Readme.docx, ReAdMe.DocX -- which document did they really want? When Jane Doe calls and tells John Doe to open the "readme" document, which one does she mean?

      • jasonthorsness7 hours ago
        Case-insensitive helpers around a case-sensitive filenames are the best of both worlds. I don't want hello.txt to BE the same as Hello.txt, I just want to find it without using a capital letter. Thanks to this thread I just discovered <code>bind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on'</code> for bash which is going to make my life as someone who frequently switches between WSL2 and Windows cmd more pleasant.
        • betelgeuse62 hours ago
          Having both hello.txt and Hello.txt is bad design in the first place no matter how you view it.
      • PaulHoule8 hours ago
        If I ask the question of "would it be perverse to deliberately write code to systematically depending on case?" I think about coding 11001000 as 'AAaaAaaa' or instead of a random identifier written like 798951cb-9fa4-4ca6-9a36-6b098a9cbd25 you write likewise in more or less

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii85

        that last would be clever but unwise to write to the filesystem

    • cranberryturkey8 hours ago
      macOS also is case insensitive
  • meitham6 hours ago
    I grew to like case insensitive dbms like SQLServer as it makes me think less about casing when I write queries, but always wondered if that comes at cost of performance!
  • 8 hours ago
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