Re: Questions about Unicode Normalization Form

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2024 at 04:30:55AM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> As I understand it, an important usecase for the casefold feature is
> running Windows games under WINE.  I don't do this myself (sgt-puzzles
> is more my speed), but there's a pretty important market for this.
> Wasn't this why Gabriel was funded to work on it (eg commit b886ee3e778e)?
> Or was that the Android usecase?

Good point.  Your history is correct; the other use case, which Gabriel
was funded to do the work for, was for Steam for Linux, which uses a
fork of Wine called Stream Play.

The other potential use case for casefold is that it would accelarate
Samba servers, which will first try to do a lookup on the filename but
if it gets ENOENT, has to do an O(1) readdir search to see if there is
a case insensitive match to the given lookup.  I haven't heard of
anyone who has actually configured their CIFS server to do this, but
it should work.

						- Ted