On Fri, 29 Mar 2002, Martin Husemann wrote:

> I think this has been discussed before, but nothing happened ;-)
>
> I'd like to suggest we create a new mount option to make file name lookups
> case insensitive. With this mount flag, file names would preserve their case,
> but on lookup it would be ignored.

Interesting.

> Some filesystems would force this flag (amigafs, msdosfs).
> I vaguealy remember some PRs about i.e. msdosfs that would be magically
> solved this way.
>
> I know this is a problem with UTF8 filenames and non-ascii filenames in
> general. I have no idea how to solve that problem and would ignore it for
> now (only implementing ASCII, or {happens to fit my neesds} iso-8859-1).

The problem with this is that there is no easy way to do this. It came up
at the IETF meeting. The problem is that to propery do this comparison,
you need locale information. One main example involves the traditional and
simplified kanji characters in the unicode set. In many Chineese locales,
they are considered equivalent. But in Japanese locales, they are not.

So what do we do?

> An example where I need this: I have a /mp3, mounted via NFS on another
> NetBSD machine that also exports it via Samba. For this filesystem I'd
> like to use this flag, to make it behave consistent for all clients.
>
> Furthermore I think if we teach Samba about this flag, it would speed up
> quite a bit.

That would be cool. But see concerns above.

Take care,

Bill