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Several years ago, when I'd first moved to SF, I got a scholarship to WWDC for working for ACM, and I took advantage of the opportunity to go to a Birds-of-Feat
by justizin 12y ago
Several years ago, when I'd first moved to SF, I got a scholarship to WWDC for working for ACM, and I took advantage of the opportunity to go to a Birds-of-Feather for people interested in "Darwin filesystems" or something like that. It was basically a little conference room with the FS team, and I asked, flat-out, "Why case insensitive?"
And they answered, flat-out: "Microsoft Office"
Even this past week, I was talking with coworkers about having trouble with nothing but Valve Steam on my Macs that have a case-sensitive filesystem[0]. That's particularly odd, since it works on Linux now, but that's another matter.
What I found most notable about this thread, is this quote from Linus:
"And Apple let these monkeys work on their filesystem? Seriously?"
I'm pretty sure Apple actually _fired_ anyone who wanted any of the things done anything close to any way that Linus Torvalds would agree with.
ext* not being particularly perfect, I'm happy to have both. I mean, ext2 is hard to complain about, but it comes from an era where basically all filesystems were terrible, literally the era when SGI started installing backup batteries to race with fsync().
ext4 has an alarming number of corruption bugs, but I'm sure it's not because of insane unicode handling, though I take Linus' description of how the OSX filesystem works with a grain of salt. He can't possibly _care_ to know as much about it as he knows about Linux's.
[0] achievable by formatting HFS+X in Disk Utility in Recovery Mode, then installing onto that drive
- thehacker005263 12y agoWhy wouldn't Microsoft office not work properly if the file system is case-sensitive ?
- twoodfin 12y agoJust a guess, but multiple hard-coded references to the same file with inconsistent case?
- phaemon 12y ago> ext4 has an alarming number of corruption bugs Which bugs are these? > though I take Linus' description of how the OSX filesystem works with a grain of salt. He can't possibly _care_ to know as much about it as he knows about Linux's. http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/fs/hfsplus http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...
- justizin 12y ago"Which bugs are these?" My favorite is, at least a couple years back, if you had a KVM guest with an ext4 filesystem in an image file, on an ext4 filesystem, the guest OS could corrupt the host OS. #winning Obviously, ext4 is largely a very good FS, but at least twenty people I've managed hundreds of servers with agree that if you do not need huge filesystems, huge files, or directories with tons of files, ext3 is a safer choice. I'm not saying Linus is incompetent, just that his criticism of other filesystems shouldn't be processed as if his work has no faults. One thing I wonder is, is it the filesystem, or the C library, that determines things like how unicode is interpreted in paths - his overwhelming rant focus.
- phaemon 12y ago> at least a couple years back, if you had a KVM guest with an ext4 filesystem in an image file, on an ext4 filesystem, the guest OS could corrupt the host OS. Your "alarming number of corruption bugs" is one bug from a couple of years back? ext4 is fairly well established now. A few years ago it might have been new enough that there were edge cases that needed investigation, but it's robust enough now. And there's a difference between a decent design having some bugs that can be fixed and a fundamentally broken design. Linus seems to be arguing that HFS+ is the latter. The problem with HFS+ is precisely that it needs to handle unicode in the filesystem because it needs to consider different names as the same. And, seemingly, it does it even worse than NFTS does.