4 ms·

MacOS and Windows

• jolmg 6y ago
  I guess it shows that I haven't really used either of those in a long time.
  • Jtsummers 6y ago
    macOS has defaulted to be case insensitive largely due to historical and perhaps usability reasons. You can opt to make it case sensitive (and I do, which broke Steam for several years but that also freed my time).
    • emodendroket 6y ago
      When necessary you can make an auto-expanding volume that's case-sensitive and leave your host FS alone. I have not found that I really want to have differently-cased but otherwise identical filenames in the real world at any point though.
      • dhosek 6y ago
        Ages ago, I heard from co-workers at a company that I had left that there was an issue because of some file-naming in a PHP application that they were trying to run locally on a Mac. There was foo.php which was the interface and Foo.php which had a class definition in it. What idiot would name files like that? I said. You, they answered. I don't do that sort of thing anymore.
      • earthboundkid 6y ago
        A bug that affects my teams once every few years is a developer will create a file named "A.txt" check it into Git, realize it should be "a.txt" and rename it, and then basically everything will shit the bed and you waste a day figuring out why nothing is working. A related bug is a developer will make a webpage called /a/ but link to /A/ and then the link will be broken in production. At this point, I have seen this same bug enough times to be able to fix it reasonably quickly, but it definitely wastes time for the team.
        • emodendroket 6y ago
          Yeah, my current company encourages development in a case-sensitive volume and I assume this is why. But this is more an issue of your development environment working differently than prod than a problem with the notion of case insensitivity per se.
        • jesboat 6y ago
          We added a commit hook to block case conflicts.
• cma 6y ago
  In windows, the underlying ntfs is still case sensitive, and that gets made use of with the WSL 1.0 stuff.
  • chungy 6y ago
    Before Windows XP, any application could open a file with a case-sensitive flag to request the operating system to not do any case folding. Starting with XP, the same feature exists but requires a registry key set (and a reboot) to instruct the kernel to allow case-sensitive operations. Starting with Windows 10, the aforementioned key still works, but there's also a per-directory case-sensitive flag that forces all DOS and Windows programs to have case-sensitive operations unconditionally. This is made to great effect in both WSL1 and Cygwin.
• trollian 6y ago
  But git is largely used by programmers.