There's an interesting issue with module names that has been raised on Perlmonks:
http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=345472
A good article.
There are actually a couple of ways that OpenVMS can work around this issue.
With OpenVMS 7.3-1, On ODS-5 disks, and application can request case sensitivity in file lookups. So you could build Perl to live in a case preserved environment.
Some other hacks for preserving case have been tried on VAX and Alpha, a common one is to use the reserved "$" character to indicate a case change. With only 39 characters allowed in a file name, you quickly run into another barrier.
One thing that might be useful is to adopt one of the schemes that used to be used with LINUX and other CDROMS to get around the 8.3 filename limitations, at least for directory that are read only or read mostly, like you would find for a build distribution.
A special file was placed in each directory that mapped the short filenames to the expected filenames. The LINUX CD-ROM file systems knew to look in this file for the real file name.
It should not be hard to write a procedure that generated such a file from a case preserved directory tree to be included in a tarball, ZIP archive or backup save set. And then used after a restore on an ODS-5 file system to make sure that the restored case was correct.
A wrapper to the C file functions could be written that translate these names on the fly, which would allow such modules to be stored and built on an ODS-2 file system.
Storing the "UNIX" exact case filename in a application specific ACE is also an option.
For these options to be really effective some standard translation method would be needed for all applications. I am not sure that there is enough interest in all the people working on porting affected programs to be interested.
Another option might be to look at storing .PM and .POD, and other such modules in text libraries. Then the wrappers to the C file functions will look in text libraries for modules instead of directories.
The DECC compiler uses this for the header files.
This may actually improve the performance of the Perl interpreter, and would also work on VAX.
-John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Personal Opinion Only
