[fpc-pascal] FPC with case insensitive file system under Linux

Sven Barth pascaldragon at googlemail.com
Fri Feb 24 18:08:30 CET 2012


Am 24.02.2012 12:09 schrieb "Graeme Geldenhuys" <graemeg.lists at gmail.com>:
>
> Hi,
>
> [rant]
> I'm just sick of the idiocy of Linux/Unix with there case sensitive
> file systems! Google'ing a round for the reason for this, it seems
> that in the 60's, it was C programmers that decided that searching for
> case sensitive files was easier to implement (and marginally faster).
> Well, 40+ years later, that is totally irrelevant - yet we are still
> suck (by default) with case sensitive file systems. Mac OS X, Windows
> and OS/2 proves that there is no problems with case insensitive file
> systems, even for various locales. It also makes it MUCH easier for
> the end-user. I see no reason why Linux must still be stuck with this.
> Anyway, that is why I am busy reformatting all my JFS file systems (I
> have long ago standardised on JFS) with the -O option to make them
> case insensitive.
> [/rant]
>
>
> Anyway, back to the point.... I seriously doubt there would be any
> problems, but I'll ask anyway. Has anybody here used JFS (case
> insensitive option enabled) with FPC and experienced any problems? I
> doubt there would be, because Mac OS X by default is case insensitive
> too - and it is also a *nix system.
>
> In the same breath, any possible Lazarus issues?
>
>
> PS:
> Anybody know of other Linux file systems that have a case insensitive
> option? I really thought ext2 had this, but searching now through the
> man pages, it seems I was mistaken. Anybody know if Btrfs would have
> such an option?

Did you know that NTFS itself is also a case sensitive filesystem? Also the
Windows kernel can handle case sensitive files and directories. It's just
the Win32 subsystem that does the lowercase thing (by passing a option for
case insensitivity to the kernel's functions).

One can see that in two cases besides looking at the source (of ReactOS):
- use a ext2 filesystem with e.g. Ext2IFS (it should already contain files
with different casing only)
- use the Posix subsystem which allows the creation of case sensitive files
on NTFS

Windows Explorer and Cmd's dir will display those files, but you can edit
only the contents of one file. Using the Posix subsystem or by direct
access to the kernel's you can work with these files correctly though.

Regards,
Sven
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