Re: Re-casing directories on case-insensitive systems

[Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg@dewire.com>]

fredagen den 11 januari 2008 skrev Linus Torvalds:
> I do agree that we could/should do something to help with case-insensitive 
> filesystems.
> 
> I absolutely *detest* those things, and I think that people who design 
> them are total morons - with MS-DOS, you could understand it (people 
> didn't know better), but with OS X?

Could it be some comfort that the other SCM's I know of make a mess of
these cases, regardless of the number of digits in the price tag.

[...]

> Almost all of the code that actually touches the index is in read-cache.c, 
> and it's not like that is a very complex data structure (or a very big 
> file), so adding another key to the sorting probably wouldn't be too 
> horrid. But it's definitely a lot more than just a few lines of code!

Could we just have a lookup table index extension for identifying the 
duplicates (when checking is enabled using core configuration option #3324)? 
That table would keep a mapping from a normalized form (maybe include 
canonical encoding while we're at it) to the actual octet sequence(s) used.

Many operations would translate any supplied form throug the table before
doing the lookup so if we have Foo.h and give FOO.h to git add, it would 
notice and perform add (update index) on Foo.h instead as that is the form we 
alreay know (or refuse yielding an error message; pick your poison). And, 
well you get the picture.

-- robin