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

[Tomas Hajny]

On Fri, February 24, 2012 12:21, michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Feb 2012, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
 .
 .
>> 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.
>
> There is a constant in the system unit which controls the 'case sensitive'
> option for filename comparisions. You may have problems, because it is set
> to True by default on Linux/Unix
>
> See:
>
> http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/system/filenamecasesensitive.html
>
> You can set its value, though, it is a typed constant.

One concrete example - if you create a unit and store it in a file with a
mixed case name, it will be found by the compiler in your case. If you
share this source with someone else (also using Linux like you), it may
not be found. This would be an equal problem if done by someone on
Windows, but

BTW, I've heard some time ago that Linux kernel contains some files
differing only in letter case. If this is the case, you may not be able to
upgrade to a newer kernel if your filesystem is case insensitive.
Obviously, this is not related to FPC so I suggest directing potential
responses to this part to fpc-other.

Tomas