[R-SIG-Mac] Case distinction on a Mac.

[Rolf Turner]

Thanks for a very clear and enlightening discussion of the issue.

	cheers,

		Rolf Turner

On 21/02/2009, at 11:10 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

>
> On Feb 20, 2009, at 15:20 , Rolf Turner wrote:
>
>>
>> On 20/02/2009, at 1:29 PM, Timothy Bates wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Rolf,
>>> By default, the file system is not case-sensitive.
>>> So the answer to file.exists(".Rdata") is  correct. And you won't be
>>> able to write .RData without overwriting .Rdata
>>>
>>> You can format a drive with a case-sensitive file system if you wish
>>> (Spotlight:Disk Utility), but many applications won't be happy to
>>> find
>>> folders containing files with the same (insensitive) name inside.
>>
>> So I'd probably be opening a massive can of worms for myself if I
>> tried
>> to go the re-formatting route.  I guess I'll just have to live with
>> the
>> case-insensitivity.  It seems a really dumb design choice on the part
>> of Apple, but.  They have a perfectly good Unix system underlying
>> their
>> shaganappi GUI structure, but they let it get mucked up by this case-
>> insensitivity
>> shambles.
>>
>
> As always, it's purely historical reasons. The unix layer is agnostic
> to those issues and HFS+ design couldn't care less about the case (in
> fact it's much more difficult to create a "real" case-insensitive FS
> such as HFS+ nowadays with unicode etc.) - it's just something that
> seemed a good idea long time ago (before OS X). As noted, case-
> sensitive HFS+ (more precisely HFSX with keyCompareType set to
> kHFSBinaryCompare) is around ever since OS X 10.3 for those who think
> they need it. (As an aside - I believe the POSIX certification of OS X
> 10.5 is for the case-sensitive version of HFSX).
>
> I wouldn't recommend reformatting. Since not all apps are happy it's
> much easier (and safer) to just add another partition formated case-
> sensitively (HFSX or ZFS I'd say) which you can then use as desired
> for projects that require case-sensitivity. In general due to the fact
> that the vast majority of all users have case-insensitive file systems
> (Windows and default HFS+ on OS X) it's a good idea to test on a case-
> insensitive system to see whether things break. [I like HFS+ for web
> servers because I really hate case-sensitivity of URLs if you have to
> type them...].
>
> An upgrade to 10.6 is not likely to change the case-sensitivity of
> existing partitions, either. The ZFS comment in this thread was IMHO
> entirely irrelevant, because it's not about availability of case-
> sensitivity but the existing defaults and I don't see why (or even
> how) would Apple perform HFS+ to ZFS conversion during an update.
>
> Cheers,
> S
>
>
>
>> 	cheers,
>>
>> 		Rolf Turner
>>
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