3 ms·

Personally I think making file names case sensitive was not a good idea. I know some people like this but I have seen a ton of errors just because somebody type

Personally I think making file names case sensitive was not a good idea. I know some people like this but I have seen a ton of errors just because somebody typed "MyFile" instead "Myfile". I also think that file names should be more constrained. If we didn't have whitespace in file names we could have avoided uncounted hours of people trying to get quoting right.

esotericn 8y ago
The latter I think makes sense (disallowing characters like *, for example). We have a reasonable concept of special characters (just look at the top 5 used shells or something). The former I'm not so sure. It's very 'ascii-centric', for lack of a better term. I think in order for that to make sense you'd need to disable UTF8 filenames entirely; the filesystem doesn't know, or care, that there's a relationship between a and A and any number of other Unicode variants, and why should it?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I know. Technically a file name should just be a sequence of any characters. But from observation I have seen people spend an enormous amount of time tracking down simple typos so I am not sure the flexibility is worth it.
Symbiote 8y ago
That would be much more complicated to implement. The file system would need to understand the lower/uppercase version of every Unicode character (e.g. Greek, Cyrillic), and that can change depending on what language we're using (e.g. Turkish I and İ). I think it's Windows and Mac OS X that made the mistake, with case-insensitive filesystems. How do they handle I and İ?
- TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
  FWIW, macOS lets you use a case-sensitive filesystem, it's just not the default. In my experience, almost everything works perfectly fine out of the box. The only serious problem I've encountered, which I'd imagine is a real deal-breaker for some, is that all of Adobe's products refuse to install on a case-sensitive filesystem. IntelliJ editors also show you a warning telling you to add the following custom property: `idea.case.sensitive.fs=true`. Although I find it odd that they make you manually set the value, since they can clearly detect when it's needed... On rare occasions homebrew will fail to install something, but it's usually fixed quickly with a small tweak to the formula. Ever since I switched a couple years back I've probably had to fix around 2 or 3 obscure packages, and I always push the change upstream.
GordonS 8y ago
At the very least, I'd say allowing ASCII control characters in filenames was a mistake. I think only NUL and forward slash are disallowed, which is needlessly over-permissive.

esotericn 8y ago

The latter I think makes sense (disallowing characters like *, for example). We have a reasonable concept of special characters (just look at the top 5 used shells or something). The former I'm not so sure. It's very 'ascii-centric', for lack of a better term. I think in order for that to make sense you'd need to disable UTF8 filenames entirely; the filesystem doesn't know, or care, that there's a relationship between a and A and any number of other Unicode variants, and why should it?

maxxxxx 8y ago
I know. Technically a file name should just be a sequence of any characters. But from observation I have seen people spend an enormous amount of time tracking down simple typos so I am not sure the flexibility is worth it.

Symbiote 8y ago

That would be much more complicated to implement. The file system would need to understand the lower/uppercase version of every Unicode character (e.g. Greek, Cyrillic), and that can change depending on what language we're using (e.g. Turkish I and İ). I think it's Windows and Mac OS X that made the mistake, with case-insensitive filesystems. How do they handle I and İ?

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
FWIW, macOS lets you use a case-sensitive filesystem, it's just not the default. In my experience, almost everything works perfectly fine out of the box. The only serious problem I've encountered, which I'd imagine is a real deal-breaker for some, is that all of Adobe's products refuse to install on a case-sensitive filesystem. IntelliJ editors also show you a warning telling you to add the following custom property: `idea.case.sensitive.fs=true`. Although I find it odd that they make you manually set the value, since they can clearly detect when it's needed... On rare occasions homebrew will fail to install something, but it's usually fixed quickly with a small tweak to the formula. Ever since I switched a couple years back I've probably had to fix around 2 or 3 obscure packages, and I always push the change upstream.

GordonS 8y ago

At the very least, I'd say allowing ASCII control characters in filenames was a mistake. I think only NUL and forward slash are disallowed, which is needlessly over-permissive.