Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity

Linus Torvalds
2004-02-18T03:04:12Z

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> Well, we don't want to support a bunch of hacks to make it behave like
> Windows if what Windows does doesn't make sense.

I'd disagree, for a very simple reason: case-insensitivity itself simply
does not make sense, so the _only_ reason for having a bunch of hacks is
literally to support windows file exports and nothing else.

I obviously agree with the fact that we should _not_ put those hacks into
the VFS layer proper - we should keep them as a separate thing, and we
should make it clear that it makes no sense _except_ for Windows
compatibility.

Think of it as nothing more than a binary compatibility layer, the same
way we have hooks to support "lcall 7,0" for binary compatibility with
some silly (and much less interesting) x86 OSes through external modules.

Linus