4 ms·

Case-insensitive filesystems cause so much trouble, one could almost mistakenly conclude that causing trouble is their raison d'être.

fortran77 7y ago
Other than Mac OSX, are there any other case-insensitive file systems in common use today? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-OS-X-choose-to-have-a-case-insensitive-file-system-instead-of-a-case-sensitive-one https://www.quora.com/Why-does-OS-X-choose-to-have-a-case-in... Perhaps Mac users should just apply a patch and let everyone else use case as a differentiation.
- anticensor 7y ago
  FAT is commonly used for removable media.
  - fortran77 7y ago
    FAT is not a currently maintained filesystem that a significant base of developers, other than people interested in "retrocomputing" use.
    - redis_mlc 7y ago
      Microsoft does maintain FAT, because they license it to consumer products companies.
      - ndesaulniers 7y ago
        Point is I'm not going to create a FAT partition on my disk then go work out of it.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        Maybe you won't, but other people do. Dropbox and similar services have eaten away at the practice, but a lot of people still walk around with flash drives, partition table untouched since they bought it, with all their personal and work files. Not merely just using it to transfer large photographs or pirated movies, but keeping their de facto 'home directory' in that flashdrive. For a few years in the mid to late 00s, it seemed like almost everybody was doing this. Before that, I knew people who did it with zip drives. And I even once knew a guy who tried it with DVD-RAM, but gave up pretty quick.
    - cesarb 7y ago
      Every single pen drive I've bought or been given came pre-formatted with FAT32. Every single SD card I've bought or been given came pre-formatted with FAT32. Like it or not, it's the standard filesystem for removable media up to 32 GiB, and has the advantage that unlike exFAT, it works everywhere.
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        exFAT is also case insensitive, at least in some implementations.
  - josteink 7y ago
    And what about NTFS?
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      About NTFS, the less said the better. ("If you can't say something nice ...") Even Microsoft is abandoning it as a place to keep source code. At least, their own source code. Windos is not built from a tree on NTFS because it's too slow.
    - anticensor 7y ago
      NTFS is case-sensitive, Windows applies case-insensitive matching for reads by default.
      - anaisbetts 7y ago
        This is a super academic distinction that is confusing discussion more than helping. NTFS as it is used in practice 99.9% of the time is not a case-sensitive filesystem
        anticensor 7y ago
        And a super-relevant distinction for a low-level OS/DB programmer like me.
        anaisbetts 7y ago
        But not when talking about whether #include <version> is bad!
    - anaisbetts 7y ago
      NTFS is also case-insensitive though case-maintaining, similar to HFS+/APFS
      - fortran77 7y ago
        Not true.
bendiksolheim 7y ago
What troubles do they cause? I might have been lucky, but during my ~10 years on a a mac, I do not remember having had any problems with case sensitivity on a file system level. I might be a special case though, as I always name my files in lower case and with hyphens instead of spaces. Actually, I kinda like not having the possibility of having both "Downloads" and "downloads" by mistake in my home folder.
- jackewiehose 7y ago
  Seems like you never had the joy to port some windows-software to linux where the original developers weren't aware of case-sensitive systems. And you never hat to work with buggy windows-applications that randomly rewrite/rename files to all upper-case or something like that.
  - tom_ 7y ago
    If Unix were case-insensitive too, none of this would be an issue.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      Some MacOS installations are case sensitive, others are not. Sometimes you find software that was written and tested on the case insensitive version that fails on case-sensitive filesystems. Case insensitive filesystems made more sense decades ago than they do today. Case insensitivity is fundamentally a UX feature that has been implemented in the wrong layer. Rather than the filesystem itself being case insensitive, the search functionality in GUI interfaces to the filesystem should be case insensitive. And furthermore, the user should never be typing out the complete name of any file that already exists, because everything should provide auto-completions of existing filenames.
    - jakeogh 7y ago
      You want the rest of us to suffer your nerf-fs too? No.
- cesarb 7y ago
jackewiehose 7y ago
> Case-insensitive filesystems cause so much trouble, one could almost mistakenly conclude that causing trouble is their raison d'être. I too hate windows because of it's case-insensitivity but that's not the problem here. The problem is a messed up Include-Path and/or the shitty naming/placing of C/++-standard-headers.
- angry_octet 7y ago
  The problem is the hubris of compiler maintainers.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  > windows It’s amusing and frustrating that you use a lowercase W here, expect everyone to know what you mean, while arguing in favour of case-sensitive filenames - the user-hostile systems which would stubbornly refuse to know what you mean.
rocky1138 7y ago
I feel like if you choose to run a case insensitive file system, you are on your own to work around it, sort of like the devs working on porting things like PHP or node to Windows. It's expected that on those platforms, you will have more compatibility issues because what you're running is a hack. What I've never seen is an easy way to convert a case insensitive file system into a valid one after the fact. It would be great to give people an easy way to fix it after the fact.
emergie 7y ago
Aside of caseness there is another a bit similar problem. Unicode allows different forms that lead to the same representation for the user. Gödel.txt may be written as - G-\u00F6-del.txt where \u00F6 is "Latin Small Letter O with Diaeresis" or - G-o\0308-del.txt where \u0308 is "Combining Diaeresis" From user perspective they are indistinguishable. Traditional Linux filesystems do not normalize this in any way. MacOS filesystems normalize it to decomposed form with "Combining Diaeresis" (which is mad). NTFS does not normalize, but windows apis behave differently - if you create NFC+NFD Gödel.txts under same directory then you will either see both, see one, or even see both, but be able to select only first from system "open file" selector.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Unicode filenames becomes a true bundle of joy when you're dealing with ideologically mixed systems like a unix client and unix server, but with samba in the middle. Boy oh boy do I love that.

fortran77 7y ago

Other than Mac OSX, are there any other case-insensitive file systems in common use today? https://www.quora.com/Why-does-OS-X-choose-to-have-a-case-insensitive-file-system-instead-of-a-case-sensitive-one https://www.quora.com/Why-does-OS-X-choose-to-have-a-case-in... Perhaps Mac users should just apply a patch and let everyone else use case as a differentiation.

anticensor 7y ago
FAT is commonly used for removable media.
- fortran77 7y ago
  FAT is not a currently maintained filesystem that a significant base of developers, other than people interested in "retrocomputing" use.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    Microsoft does maintain FAT, because they license it to consumer products companies.
    - ndesaulniers 7y ago
      Point is I'm not going to create a FAT partition on my disk then go work out of it.
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        Maybe you won't, but other people do. Dropbox and similar services have eaten away at the practice, but a lot of people still walk around with flash drives, partition table untouched since they bought it, with all their personal and work files. Not merely just using it to transfer large photographs or pirated movies, but keeping their de facto 'home directory' in that flashdrive. For a few years in the mid to late 00s, it seemed like almost everybody was doing this. Before that, I knew people who did it with zip drives. And I even once knew a guy who tried it with DVD-RAM, but gave up pretty quick.
  - cesarb 7y ago
    Every single pen drive I've bought or been given came pre-formatted with FAT32. Every single SD card I've bought or been given came pre-formatted with FAT32. Like it or not, it's the standard filesystem for removable media up to 32 GiB, and has the advantage that unlike exFAT, it works everywhere.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      exFAT is also case insensitive, at least in some implementations.
- josteink 7y ago
  And what about NTFS?
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    About NTFS, the less said the better. ("If you can't say something nice ...") Even Microsoft is abandoning it as a place to keep source code. At least, their own source code. Windos is not built from a tree on NTFS because it's too slow.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    NTFS is case-sensitive, Windows applies case-insensitive matching for reads by default.
    - anaisbetts 7y ago
      This is a super academic distinction that is confusing discussion more than helping. NTFS as it is used in practice 99.9% of the time is not a case-sensitive filesystem
      - anticensor 7y ago
        And a super-relevant distinction for a low-level OS/DB programmer like me.
        anaisbetts 7y ago
        But not when talking about whether #include <version> is bad!
  - anaisbetts 7y ago
    NTFS is also case-insensitive though case-maintaining, similar to HFS+/APFS
    - fortran77 7y ago
      Not true.

bendiksolheim 7y ago

What troubles do they cause? I might have been lucky, but during my ~10 years on a a mac, I do not remember having had any problems with case sensitivity on a file system level. I might be a special case though, as I always name my files in lower case and with hyphens instead of spaces. Actually, I kinda like not having the possibility of having both "Downloads" and "downloads" by mistake in my home folder.

jackewiehose 7y ago
Seems like you never had the joy to port some windows-software to linux where the original developers weren't aware of case-sensitive systems. And you never hat to work with buggy windows-applications that randomly rewrite/rename files to all upper-case or something like that.
- tom_ 7y ago
  If Unix were case-insensitive too, none of this would be an issue.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    Some MacOS installations are case sensitive, others are not. Sometimes you find software that was written and tested on the case insensitive version that fails on case-sensitive filesystems. Case insensitive filesystems made more sense decades ago than they do today. Case insensitivity is fundamentally a UX feature that has been implemented in the wrong layer. Rather than the filesystem itself being case insensitive, the search functionality in GUI interfaces to the filesystem should be case insensitive. And furthermore, the user should never be typing out the complete name of any file that already exists, because everything should provide auto-completions of existing filenames.
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    You want the rest of us to suffer your nerf-fs too? No.
cesarb 7y ago

jackewiehose 7y ago

> Case-insensitive filesystems cause so much trouble, one could almost mistakenly conclude that causing trouble is their raison d'être. I too hate windows because of it's case-insensitivity but that's not the problem here. The problem is a messed up Include-Path and/or the shitty naming/placing of C/++-standard-headers.

angry_octet 7y ago
The problem is the hubris of compiler maintainers.
jodrellblank 7y ago
> windows It’s amusing and frustrating that you use a lowercase W here, expect everyone to know what you mean, while arguing in favour of case-sensitive filenames - the user-hostile systems which would stubbornly refuse to know what you mean.

rocky1138 7y ago

I feel like if you choose to run a case insensitive file system, you are on your own to work around it, sort of like the devs working on porting things like PHP or node to Windows. It's expected that on those platforms, you will have more compatibility issues because what you're running is a hack. What I've never seen is an easy way to convert a case insensitive file system into a valid one after the fact. It would be great to give people an easy way to fix it after the fact.

emergie 7y ago

Aside of caseness there is another a bit similar problem. Unicode allows different forms that lead to the same representation for the user. Gödel.txt may be written as - G-\u00F6-del.txt where \u00F6 is "Latin Small Letter O with Diaeresis" or - G-o\0308-del.txt where \u0308 is "Combining Diaeresis" From user perspective they are indistinguishable. Traditional Linux filesystems do not normalize this in any way. MacOS filesystems normalize it to decomposed form with "Combining Diaeresis" (which is mad). NTFS does not normalize, but windows apis behave differently - if you create NFC+NFD Gödel.txts under same directory then you will either see both, see one, or even see both, but be able to select only first from system "open file" selector.

darkpuma 7y ago
Unicode filenames becomes a true bundle of joy when you're dealing with ideologically mixed systems like a unix client and unix server, but with samba in the middle. Boy oh boy do I love that.