At 11:26 AM -0700 4/20/01, Wilfredo Sanchez wrote:
>On Wednesday, April 18, 2001, at 03:01 PM, Paul Henry Smith wrote:
>
>>It's also interesting to note that they (Apple) considered the case
>>sensitivity issue a trivial matter that did not warrant a fix.
>
> I don't believe I said that in my paper, nor do I believe it was true.
Right, I should've paraphrased to say that you (Apple?) considered
the *problems* introduced by using HFS+ were trivial and so they did
not warrant changing the file system.
Here's what I was paraphrasing, btw:
" At the start of the Rhapsody project, which preceded the current
Mac OS X work, we had anticipated that this would be a big problem.
Later, when we started using HFS+ as the primary filesystem in
Darwin, we found surprisingly few problems resulting from this
behavior, and those which we do find tend to be trivial to fix. We
have yet to encounter a problem in this area which requires a complex
solution."
> The argument for case-insensitivity is just as valid as the
>argument against. The fact is you can't change a volume format
>willy-nilly. If it's not case-folding, it's not HFS+, and at that
>point you've put a lot more work on the table. Much more software
>would have broken if we had changed the filesystem than when we did
>not. The matter was far from trivial.
I completely agree that, relative to the huge task of changing the
file system, the case sensitivity issue is trivial. So what if
people have to tweak things here and there? ;)
> What I did say was that I had expected a lot more Unix stuff to
>have problems, but in fact, very little software does. Perl and
>Python both have rather stupid build-time problems to to case
>variant names, and lwp uses a rather questionable name for HEAD.
>That's hardly the end of the world, people.
Amen. (I didn't mean to drag you into this as some sort of
bogey-man. I just thought your article would help put into context
the griping about having to do things to get perl to install and work
properly. People should read it before weighing in, I think.)
Personally, I'm glad you did the work that you did, and that it works
as well as it does. THanks!
Paul
