Subject: Re: Case-insensitive filesystems
To: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 02/04/2002 14:25:32
On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 02:00:00PM -0800, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> >
> > For now, requiring UFS sounds fine.
> >
> > In the long run though, I think it would be best if we could move to not
> > needing it. Because most MacOS X installs won't have it. Most installs
> > will be single-filesystem ones, and that fs will be hfs+. So requiring UFS
> > will limit pkgsrc's usabilit much more so than on other OSs. :-(
>
> Yes, you are right.
>
> > How many places in _our_ part of pkgsrc do we have case conflicts? CVS/cvs
> > comes to mind. Any others?
>
> nkf came up earlier. I don't know how many others there are out there.

I remembered that one, but forgot the name. Thanks for the reminder.

I guess what I was getting at is that nkf's problem is in the nkf
distribution, not the part of pkgsrc we control. So there's no direct way
to get nkf to work on hfs+ outside of pkgsrc. Yes, we could patch it, but
if the maintainers want it to work with Darwin, they will need to change
the distribution.

So my hope with all of that is that some of the problems we'll see others
will see too, and hopefully they will fix. :-)

> > I realize there are going to be other problems with packages that
> > internally won't work because of case problems, but those packages won't
> > work on MacOS X anyway. The authors will have to change things to make
> > them work. So while I think we could help this, we don't have to do it all
> > ourselves. :-)
>
> Sometimes it may just be parts of the build process that require differences
> between case in filenames.

That could be easier to deal with. :-)

> > Maybe a thing to migrate to would be a package flag that says it needs a
> > case-sensitive fs, and a flag that says we have (or don't have) one. That
> > way I could for instance say I want only case insensitive packages (and
> > have it work on hfs), and you could say you want all packages (and have it
> > require ufs).
>
> An excellent suggestion - I like this idea a lot.

Thanks. I like it as it lets users decide what they want, and get it. If
you want all packages, you get them.  If you want only hfs-compatible
packages, you get only them. :-)

Take care,

Bill