Looking at case insensitivity - question

[Jens Alfke]

On 17 Apr '08, at 5:05 AM, Mads Kiilerich wrote:

> Ok. I think it is obvious that I'm strongly biased and speaking as  
> Unix user.

I'm a Unix user too, and strongly biased the other way (because my  
Unix is Mac OS X, which also defaults to a case-insensitive filesystem.)
I think we can agree that case-sensitive filesystems are more  
convenient for software development. But case-insensitive ones make  
more sense to non-geeky end-users, which is why the Mac OS has used  
one since 1984 and Windows since 1995. Neither type is going away,  
neither type is "oddball", and I'll leave it up to you to work out  
which one is in the majority.

> I really think that if the file system is case insensitive, then  
> Mercurial should ignore whatever the file system has to say about  
> casing. When files are added or renamed then it should use the  
> casing specified on the command line. As a last resort the case  
> preserving names in directory listings could be used for adding  
> directories or addremove.

Developers accustomed to the behavior of a case-insensitive filesystem  
would find that inconsistent and unintuitive. That's IMHO, of course,  
but I'm speaking as one of that group.

—Jens
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