NTFS is case insensitive and case preserving by default, but can be
made case sensitive.
Take SFU (Services For Unix) that runs on win32 systems. It shows
some of the technical ability of windows (though I'm no fan of
Windows). It runs as a peer to the win32 subsystem (not on top of it
like Cygwin). Among the interesting things it does is removes some
character limitations from win32 filenames and during the install,
can change NTFS to be a case sensitive filesystem.
SFU used to be the Interix product that was intended to bridge unix
users/developers onto win32. In recent times, it's taking a slightly
different life I believe (since being given a Mac, I've fallen
hopelessly in love it and abandoned Windows except when forced to use
it). SFU allows much GNU software (good or bad) to be built and used
on a Windows computer with not a whole lot of modification.
Triston.
On Feb 7, 2008, at 6:05 AM, Tabitha McNerney wrote:
On 2/7/08, Jochem Huhmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 2008-02-06, at 21:13, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> That's probably never going to happen. When you're dealing with
> grandma on the phone and she's saying "I can't open my file named
> ``fluffy!''", the last thing you need is to go 10 rounds trying to
> figure out whether she actually named it Fluffy, fluffY or FlUFfY.
> That is why case insensitivity was added in the first place (and
> believe me, it was a lot more work than being case sensitive).
I think no one really objects against the user interface being case
insensitive. This clearly is a feature, not a bug. But having this
feature implemented in the file system seems like only a small piece
of the right problem solved by messing around in the entirely wrong
place.
I might not be popular for asking this question but what does
Microsoft do for its NTFS file system? For example, is NTFS case
insensitive for Windows XP Home but case sensitive for Windows XP
Professional? (similar for their confusing Vista OSs)?
I think it is reasonable to expect that Microsoft also has to deal
with "Grandma" as Jordan stated, but Microsoft also has to deal
with the professional market.
Thanks,
T.M.
There's no way to take that further (in the file system) by
integrating even more useful fuzziness like recognizing "f" for "ph",
or ignoring accents or whatever. If you're dealing with international
users a case insensitive file system may save you a few rounds for
figuring out "Fluffy" against "fluffy", but you'd still have to
figure out "exposé" against "expose" or "foto" against "photo" and
there is no way to solve that at file system level. Case is only a
small part of the actual problem. This is clearly something that has
to be dealt with in the UI libraries and not in the file system. And
this is the reason why many people feel that a case insensitive file
system is a ill-conceived hack. You can't really expect to deserve
praise for painting yourself into a corner...
Just my €0.02,
Jochem
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