Martin Husemann wrote:
> > But most applications (and my brain) don't really want the rules to
> > suddenly change on them in the middle of the file system...
> 
> Think of an NTFS, HFS or FAT32 disk that you share with another OS in 
> which you dual boot your machine from time to time.

E.g. NetBSD NTFS support does implement case-insensitive file
lookups [*] and our msdosfs does too AFAIK. Some other filesystems
probably should too[**]. Note the file insensitiveness rules differ for
different filesystems (e.g. MS-DOS applied case-insensitiveness to
ASCII subset only).

Native UNIX filesystems (being if FFS, NFS, LFS or ext2fs) are case
sensitive.  That is fact of life, the most simple approach and
actually locale-friendlier than the partial attempt of MS-DOS - it's
consistent, at the very least.

Perhaps it would be useful to repeat why exactly you'd like generic 
'case-insensitiveness' support for all filesystems. I personally
don't see a need for this.

IMHO Samba can do much better job in translating file names than a kernel
reasonably can. FWIW, I don't expect filename translation to be
the actual performance bottleneck for Samba.

Jaromir
(from coutry which uses iso-8859-2 and windows-1250 encodings now, and
used about 4 other 8bit encodings in MS-DOS times)

 [*] NTFS uses Unicode characters in filenames and provides provision
     of 'lowercase mapping table', which is part of definition of
     the filesystem. So, it's possible to implement properly
     case-insensitiveness there. This is not the case for other
     filesystems, where the actual implementation is mostly ad-hoc.

 [**] Those which are case-insensitive in their 'native' OS, that is, for
     interoperatibility reasons. Especially if we happen to be able to run
     the 'native OS' binaries.
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org> http://www.NetBSD.org/Ports/i386/ps2.html
-=- We should be mindful of the potential goal, but as the tantric    -=-
-=- Buddhist masters say, ``You may notice during meditation that you -=-
-=- sometimes levitate or glow.   Do not let this distract you.''     -=-