Re: detecting case-insensitivity

[Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 06:27:20PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 08:19:46AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 05:28:33PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > > > > From: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
> > > > > Date: 09.04.2012 03.30
> > > > > 
> > > > > On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 10:00:29AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > > > > > Is there a generic way to detect whether a given filesystem is
> > > > > > case-insensitive?  If not, how should it be done?  (A bit in s_flags?)
> > > > > 
> > > > > I don't think there is a generic flag for it. We could trivially add
> > > > > one, I think, as it is generally a fixed property for the entire
> > > > > filesystem....
> > > 
> > > So, I assume the following is totally wrong, but the basic idea (create
> > > a new flag, set it based on xfs_sb_version_hasasciici, check it in nfsd)
> > > would work?
> > 
> > Looks mostly OK to me.
> > 
> > > On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 09:01:11AM +0400, Vyacheslav Dubeyko wrote:
> > > > But why does it need to detect that filesystem case-insensitive or not? In what use-case does it need to make such detection?
> > > 
> > > To be honest, I have no idea--it's not a mandatory attribute, so I think
> > > I'll instead just ceasing to support the attribute and seeing if anyone
> > > complains....
> > 
> > I suspect that there are some applications out there that might care
> > that Bruce and bruce are the same file for matching purposes (e.g. a
> > file manager)
> 
> I suppose they could try the create and find out what happens.
> 
> If they actually want to be able to predict collisions instead of
> recognizing them after the fact then they may need to know in more
> detail how we handle case, and then I worry that I'll have to start
> understanding what language like this means:
> 
> 	http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-rfc3530bis-17#section-12.7.1.3
> 
> 	...if the NFSv4 file server supports the case_insensitive file
> 	system attribute, and if the case_insensitive attribute is true
> 	for a given file system, the NFS version 4 server MUST use the
> 	Unicode case mapping tables for the version of Unicode
> 	corresponding to the character repertoire.
> 
> which isn't high on my todo list.

Right, unicode CI is a bitch to handle. There's still a lot of work
to be done in XFS before that is supported. See:

http://xfs.org/index.php/Unfinished_work#Support_for_unicode_.2F_utf8_filesystems

So if the NFSv4 flag really means full unicode CI, then there's
still work at the XFS level to be able to support that. ASCII CI is
a walk in the park compared to unicode....

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
david@fromorbit.com

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