Subject: Re: Mount option to ignore case
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
From: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/30/2002 10:01:49
On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 12:38:18PM -0800, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

AFAIK, amiga and msdos never supported unicode or kanji.  I don't think Amiga
had other charsets than 8859-1.  Msdos had only one charset, too (but it
was different from the one used by windoze, of course).

> So what do we do?

IMHO, it would be better to implement simple case-insensitivity support
than do nothing.

  -jm