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Comment by bendiksolheim | Hacker News Reader

What troubles do they cause? I might have been lucky, but during my ~10 years on a a mac, I do not remember having had any problems with case sensitivity on a file system level. I might be a special case though, as I always name my files in lower case and with hyphens instead of spaces.

Actually, I kinda like not having the possibility of having both "Downloads" and "downloads" by mistake in my home folder.

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Seems like you never had the joy to port some windows-software to linux where the original developers weren't aware of case-sensitive systems. And you never hat to work with buggy windows-applications that randomly rewrite/rename files to all upper-case or something like that.

If Unix were case-insensitive too, none of this would be an issue.

Some MacOS installations are case sensitive, others are not. Sometimes you find software that was written and tested on the case insensitive version that fails on case-sensitive filesystems.

Case insensitive filesystems made more sense decades ago than they do today. Case insensitivity is fundamentally a UX feature that has been implemented in the wrong layer. Rather than the filesystem itself being case insensitive, the search functionality in GUI interfaces to the filesystem should be case insensitive. And furthermore, the user should never be typing out the complete name of any file that already exists, because everything should provide auto-completions of existing filenames.

You want the rest of us to suffer your nerf-fs too? No.

> What troubles do they cause?

For one somewhat recent example: CVE-2014-9390 git: arbitrary command execution vulnerability on case-insensitive file systems. (Also affected mercurial IIRC.)

> What troubles do they cause?

Once, a colleague working on Linux created two files with same name but different case, and committed them to the Git repo, and then I tried pulling it on my Mac. I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I wasted a lot of time trying to sort that mess out.

(There was no real reason for them doing this, it was just a mistake on their part, and they didn't notice they'd done it before committing the files.)

You could argue that this is a problem with case sensitive file systems, not insensitive ones. In fact, this could never happen on a case insensitive file system, as you could never create a file named the same but with a different case.

It seems to me that most problems with case insensitive file systems are rather problems because there are different file systems out there. Just as there always is with "competing" standards.

The whole idea is hopelessly tied to ascii notions of alphabet, where two functions (storage a retrieval with keys, and searching for matching keys with the UI) have been conflated. What is 'case insensitive, case preserving' in Unicode for Korean or Chinese or Arabic? It doesn't remotely make sense to make some keys illegal in the file system layer for reasons of disambiguation.

The worst part is how it doesn't seem to affecr Linux- and Windows- only users.

Let me put it briefly. Much Linux software is multi platform and vice versa; this is how being the "underdog" (quotes cause servers) works. When you look at the transitive closure of the dependency graph, all sorts of case-insensative assumptions will pop up.

I'm on a shop where all developers run Linux on their laptops, but we work on tools and libraries that are supposed to run on macOS for all those other developers. Supporting them is a huge pain.

I like it when apple iOS-ifies macOS making development harder. Hopefully it brings people out of denial.

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