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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

Presumably as with today, you'll have the option. I don't have a strong opinion on case sensitivity of file names, but I suspect they'll keep it case insensitive by default. I think for the average non-technical user that two files, "MyFile.txt" and "myfile.txt", being different could lead to some confusion, and Apple historically has apparently considered that confusion unacceptable.

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The average user is also confused by "MyFile.txt" and " MyFile.txt" being different, or "Proposal II" and "Proposal 2" being different, but filesystems aren't usually built around that. I don't think case sensitivity is special enough to get that sort of treatment.

I believe the problem is also present for a large amount of third party software, making the move to case sensitive drives pretty hard to do:

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensiti... [1] http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/192185/os-x-case-se... [2] http://dcatteeu.github.io/article/2015/12/31/case-sensitive-...

I've noticed some bugs with case-sensitivity recently in Ruby, of all things.

More problematic is that many case insensitive hard drives would be copied into new machines and there would be millions of conflicts. Some utility would have to sit there and annoy people by asking them to make decisions.

I can see why there would be conflicts going case sensitive -> case insensitive, but I can't see why there would be conflicts going the other way. Am I missing something?

I think you have it backwards. If you try to expand an archive with FOO.TXT and foo.txt, what should happen if you're writing to a case insensitive file system?

    $ touch HI
    $ touch hi
    $ ls
    HI

So that's disturbing. Another problem is every software you can think of will be comparing two files case insensitively. Almost weekly I get burned by this.

    $ touch HI
    $ test -f hi && echo ok
    ok

That's not convincing me that I have it backwards. I was responding to this point in the parent comment:

> many case insensitive hard drives would be copied into new machines and there would be millions of conflicts

I still don't see where you get a conflict copying the contents of a case-insensitive file system to a case-sensitive one.

> I still don't see where you get a conflict copying the contents of a case-insensitive file system to a case-sensitive one.

Because some apps create MyFile.txt and expect to be able to access it later by myfile.txt. Adobe's applications, for example.

I had no idea. That's horrifying.

Open up the various folders of Adobe's software (on Windows). The DLLs are a mish-mash of all lowercase and upper-lower mixes. Heck, open up System32; the DLLs there are definitely not case-sensitive capable (`kbd*.dll' being one example). In fact, I bet you there's at least one program on your computer that accesses the Program Files using `C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)' instead of `%programfiles(x86)%'. In fact, even environment variables aren't case-sensitive.

I think the parent meant the other way around too.

However, the transition between the case insensitive and case sensitive filesystems isn't going to happen overnight. People will be copying files around both ways for quite some time, so the insensitive -> sensitive case is still going to be a concern.

If you have a file named "MyFile.txt" and another system is looking for "myfile.txt", then it'll not be found and Apple will not let you rename it because it thinks it's a no-op. That's frustrating as hell.

Apple's software (Finder, mv) lets you rename these. But it's true that some tools (I think git) get confused here.

Git init / clone on case-insensitive HFS+ sets `git config core.ignorecase true`, which can lead to confusing behaviour where it ignores a change in the case of a filename.

> The default is false, except git-clone(1) or git-init(1) will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.

https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config....

For the end-user they could prevent duplicate different-cased file names in the UI layer (the Finder), instead of the file system. That would be a more appropriate place for it anyway.

And then some code using Unix APIs would create two files whose names differ only in case and the UI layer would choke. This is why spray-on usability is bad.

The UI already has to deal with that anyway because it supports case sensitive volumes. What exactly constitutes case is locale specific, it differs from one user to the next, that logic would be messy to have inside the file system.

That would likely be a hassle because you'd have to be consistent for all programs that ever save or read a file. As a result it has to be an OS-level thing at least, if not at the file system level. I don't have a huge preference (case sensitive or insensitive), I think it's not worth a religious war, but whatever the choice is, it should be completely transparent to understand what convention the system is using as a coder, and as a general user.

This is a horrible solution.

Steam relies on the filesystem being insensitive.

Really? What filesystem do they use in SteamOS?

SteamOS is Linux, based on Ubuntu. So I assume it is ext4, ext3, or xfs.

Btrfs is not stable enough IMO for something like SteamOS.

SteamOS is based on an older Debian release and uses ext4.

Does Adobe still?

Yes they do.

No it doesn't. How would it work on Linux if it did?

Both, you and cuddlybacon are right. A long time ago, they worked under the assumption that the FS is case-sensitive, and all the games I installed back then had title-cased folder names. Gradually, Valve stopped caring about this, and my games stopped working. I had to go in and manually change some game folder names to lower-case. It then kept some small files under SteamApps and the downloaded games under steamapps. They have fixed that now. Now, I have both CONFIG and config in my Steam folder.

How would it work? By a combination of magic and "we can't be bothered; the users should figure out something".

Steam on Mac does, or at least did last time I tried to use it on a case-sensitive partition. It's not that steam inherently needs case-insensitivity, it's that some of the main app mixes the case of files in the app from what is on disk. So without case-insensitive FS it cannot find some files. Stupid problem really.

I know Unreal Engine 4 does, but Steam does not.

The fs should be case sensitive. If they want to enforce insensitivity it should be done with APIs for programs including the Finder.

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