feature or bug?

[Mark A. Flacy]

On 2008.01.05 00:19, Jens Alfke wrote:
> 
> So while I agree with Mark's point that, short of using a virtual
> filesystem, you can't abstract away all the issues that might arise in
> a *working directory*, I don't think it follows that it's impossible
> to make the *repository* itself robust. The previously-suggested
> approach of using names based on a digest of the filename seems like a
> good one; I don't know why Mark blew it off with "go knock yourself
> out".

I don't see the innate value of creating a distributed version control  
repository on a system when you cannot create a working directory from  
said repository on the same system.

Or to put it another way, I believe it would be much more useful in  
general to be able to tag a repository such that you *guarantee* that  
both case-preserving and case-sensitive file systems will be able to  
check out a working directory and see the exact same thing.  If you are  
working solely on case-preserving systems or solely on case-sensitive  
ones, you don't need that guarantee and the resulting code can be much  
simpler.

That seems to be a much more useful property to me, especially for  
non-programmer users.

Java programmers on cross platform systems would probably like this  
feature, given the mapping between source file names and .class files.   
If your source is on a case sensitive virtual file system but the javac  
output isn't, you can have some interesting compile failures.

-- 
Mark A. Flacy