On 19 Jan 2018, at 8:44, Jan Stary wrote:
On Jan 19 06:48:37, [email protected] wrote:
[...]
but for backwards compatibility with macOS's pre-Unix ancestors,
Huh. What are those?
Not technically "pre-Unix" but rather "pre-MacOS X." MacOS X (i.e. 10.0)
was the first version derived from the Mach/BSD hybrid developed by
NeXT. From 1984 to 2000, MacOS was entirely unrelated to any Unix, and
its native filesystems (MFS and HFS) were case-insensitive but
case-preserving. Apple retained that as the default in MacOS X because
for many versions (10.0 through 10.4) they included the "Classic"
emulation layer that supported the use of software written for MacOS 8 &
9.
For many years, many 3rd-party developers (including HP, Lexmark, and
Adobe) continued to release MacOS X software that broke on
case-sensitive filesystems, due to internal file references with case
variances vs. the installed software. I have personally run all my MacOS
X systems with case-sensitive filesystems (even when that meant using
UFS) and it has been a couple of years since I had to patch up a sloppy
app or printer driver with symlinks to match what the code used.
