Hi Friends,
I've been developing in Perl on OS X ever since the OS X Public
Beta. Somewhere along the line I came to believe that I should
set up my system with the boot drive formatted as Max OS
Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled).
Emphasis here on "Case-sensitive".
My question is: Is this practice (still) needed?
Background
----------
I started doing this after some discussions on this list several
years ago; the issue was that some Perl modules assume(d)
file-system case-sensitivity. For example, here's a quote from a
message by Ari Kahn on Mar 8 2002:
"... difficulties when installing a software package that was
designed for a
case-sensitive system. For example, libwww-perl by default
installs an HTTP
script called HEAD, which is used to make an HTTP HEAD request.
If this is
installed to /usr/bin, it can overwrite the BSD built-in /usr/bin/head
command, used for reading the beginnings of files. To prevent
this kind of
collision when using HFS+, it's necessary to configure CPAN.pm
to install
modules to a private directory. "
I didn't choose the recommended solution at the time of always
installing CPAN modules in a private directory. Instead, every
time I formatted a new boot drive, I made it case-sensitive.
Over the years this has caused a few difficulties, particularly
with some commercial software such as Quark Xpress refusing to
install, but I only use case-sensitive formatting on my dev
machine, so it's not usually a problem.
I am about to set up a Mac Mini OS X 10.7 server as a new dev
machine, and am wondering whether I still need to re-format as
case-sensitive before proceeding. I'd like to avoid the
limitations of case-sensitivity if possible. If I format as
case-INsensitive, will CPAN now help me do the right thing?
Thanks.
- Bruce
_bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz_ca_
