Linux

Hey I have one of these case sensitive Mac OS X stories as well!

I gave it a try one time, and I found out the hard way some developers don't test everything in a case sensitive environment. I don't remember what specifically went wrong, but Adium, The instant messaging client, blew up because it couldn't find certain files on the local hard drive.

The best things is when the OS enforces magic onto the filesystem. Ntfs is case sensitive but windoze is not. So expect some real fun times if you use ntfs on other systems.

To be precise, longer names ending with ~1 are a backwards compatible fix for DOS programs introduced after Windows started supporting longer filenames.

Case insensitive file systems arent lazy, they're a programmer putting in a lot of effort to try and be helpful only to realize that their helpful system doesn't actually cover all the edge cases it needs to and thus just adds a whole extra layer of complication and annoyance to the project.

Kind of the opposite. It takes more effort to make a filesystem case-insensitive. Binary comparison is the laziest approach. (Note that laziness is a virtue.)

I'm on the fence as to which is better. Putting backwards compatibility aside, there's a perfectly good case to be made for case-insensitivity being more intuitive to the human user.

Apple got into a strange position when marrying Mac OS (case-insensitive) and NeXTSTEP (case-sensitive). It used to be possible to install OS X on case-sensitive HFS+ but it was never very well supported and I think they axed it somewhere down the road.

Isn't bcache the one made by the solo dev who was causing all that drama trying to merge a bunch of crap during a freeze last year?

If so that explains quite a bit lmao

It isn't normally, but it, like e.g. Ext4, allows case insensitivity mostly for the sake of Wine.

Its' lead dev is also so full of himself, it's insufferable

Windows. Probably.

I believe macOS's default partition is case-insensitive but not case-preserving. I remember having to check the HUnit (unit testing library for Haskell) in a special partition because darcs barfed on a file whose case changed.

I remember that the BeFS in BeOS was also case-preserving but not case-sensitive. Scot Hacker, the author of the BeOS Bible, relayed an explanation that resonated with him. (Bear in mind that this was pre-2000 and the computing landscape was much different. This was also the time that macOS was born in.)

The short of it is that it's for usability. The average person doesn't really differentiate between upper- and lowercase; at most, it's just aesthetics. If they want to find their resume, they don't care if it's spelled resume, Resume, RESUME, or even rEsUmE. Why should the computer require that they conform to a design decision that was made decades prior?

Since then, the world has changed again and the average user of today is even further isolated from the internals of a system. And what was a good idea in 1997 may not longer be relevant now.

Ouch. Relying on case sensitivity is a lousy coding choice, anyway. No one is made better off by having a case change carry meaning.

Edit: Before anyone asks, I like case convention as a courtesy, too. But my code doesn't rely on it.

ISO 8601? A man of culture I see.