On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 09:43:46AM -0700, John W Baxter wrote:
} At 6:30 -0400 4/18/01, Paul J. Schinder wrote:
} >I assume there's no actual reason that HFS+ *must* be case
} >insensitive, and certainly no actual reason that *Darwin* is case
} >insensitive.
}
} HFS has been case-insensitive since it was introduced in the mid-1980s time
} frame to replace the case-insensitive predecessor.
Right.
} Changing HFS+ to case
} sensitive when it was introduced a few years ago simply wasn't a viable
} option: it would have broken far too much.
I don't see how taking the Pascal out of the pieces that lay names
down on the disk could break anything then or now. Classic MacOS
users rarely type file names, anyway, so the reflex that says type
"readme" when the file is named "README" isn't well developed. So far
as I can remember, MacOS has always been case preserving, even back in
1984, so it isn't as if MacOS users aren't used to seeing mixed case
or lower case filenames. The fact that "README" and "readme" would
now be different files shouldn't confuse anyone.
I realize that Unix is only a means to an end for Apple, and they may
not relly give a damn so long as Aqua looks pretty, but this makes the
task of getting Unix sources running on Mac OS X far more difficult
(two problems showed in up perl 5.6.1, for example). Stupid little
things like this happen because the (admittedly big) new kid on the
block, in 2001, after 20+ years of case sensitive filesystems in Unix,
decides to put their OS on a case insensitive filesystem (something
that most likely they had to make a considerable effort to do). With
the huge disks on modern systems and the fact that OS X only runs on
recent machines anyway, they could have used UFS for the Mac OS X
partition and required an HFS+ partition for Classic.
}
} --John
}
} --
} John Baxter [EMAIL PROTECTED] Port Ludlow, WA, USA
}
--
Paul Schinder
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
