5 ms·
I've never liked case-sensitivity in file-systems, personally. I've always found it to be annoying with no utility that I could discern. If main.h and Main.h ar
by burnte 9y ago
I've never liked case-sensitivity in file-systems, personally. I've always found it to be annoying with no utility that I could discern. If main.h and Main.h are truly different, I find it more useful to make the file name more descriptive than just changing letters. Would you tell me why you find it useful? Not an argument, I'd like to know what other people do with that feature.
- noncoml 9y agoPersonally I don’t care, but got interoperability problems a couple of times. One has to be very careful when they share a git repository between case-sensitive and case-insensitive OSes
- notamy 9y ago> Would you tell me why you find it useful? I think you answered this yourself: > If main.h and Main.h are truly different, I find it more useful to make the file name more descriptive than just changing letters. I truly doubt that most users - especially non-technical users - actually would do this.
- burnte 9y agoThen what utility does it have?
- andybak 9y agoThese hypothetical non-technical users will also be baffled that main.h and Main.h aren't the same file (let's leave aside the question of what these non-technical users are doing with .h files in the first place. Let me argue this another way. Nobody regards John Smith and john smith as different names.
- mclehman 9y agoThat said, brian d foy is not Brian D Foy.
- coldtea 9y ago>I've never liked case-sensitivity in file-systems, personally. I've always found it to be annoying with no utility that I could discern. The utility is that the filenames are digitally unambiguous buckets of bytes and we avoid 1000000 ways things can go wrong with case-insensitivity, plus the huge performance penalties. Sometimes catering to how the machine works makes things better than going through hoops for marginal returns and complicating every part of the stack with that technical debt. >If main.h and Main.h are truly different, I find it more useful to make the file name more descriptive than just changing letters. Well, main.h and Main.h are visually different, aren't they?
- eridius 9y agoFilenames are not buckets of bytes. They're human-readable strings. Treating them as buckets of bytes is a great way to end up in very confusing situations, like having two files named "über.png" with no way to visually distinguish them.
- zlynx 9y agoI like that they ARE buckets of bytes on Unixen. As an analogy take the common text file. Would you like it if the read() and write() system calls looked at the file extension and refused to write non-ASCII or non-Unicode into it? I would not like that. The flexibility to do whatever I want with those bytes is more important than guaranteeing correct text encoding. If someone wants that for their system, make the user software do it, not the kernel.
- zlynx 9y agoI didn't write it, but I ran into a problem on Windows when pulling a Git repo that had INSTALL (the instructions to the user) and install (a script that ran the installation).
- michaelmrose 9y agoFor tons of languages other than English case sensitivity is a more complicated affair and handling it in the file system is a dumb idea. Further since your system could interact with systems that including files created by a computer not a person you want them to be able to deal with afile and Afile properly.