That's not true.
> And then there were some that differed only in case, which honestly I don't know how we manage that, as the non-Windows side is macOS, and yet roughly once per year someone introduces two files, same name, differing case into the repo.
Sounds like a crappily maintained repo.
"Suppose you wanted the listing file to go straight to the printer. [...] So you typed “PRN” as the filename. Now, the assembler doesn’t know about these magic filenames. So the assembler will try to create the file “PRN.LST” and then start writing to it. Little does the assembler realize that the output is actually going to the printer."
Windows path handling is full of special cases and subtle gotchas. See https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-definitiv... for a very detailed list.
Also you could always create such names with the right APIs, so one application could create such files, but another can't delete them or open them.
Well, just for you, I've searched the Slack history. IIRC, this was inside a WSL session in Windows, but it definitely originated on a Windows machine:
$ git checkout rename-some-files
error: invalid path 'foo-crate-1/src/aux.rs'
error: invalid path 'foo-crate-2/src/aux.rs'
error: invalid path 'foo-crate-3/src/aux.rs'
<more filenames with other errors>