Subject: Re: Mount option to ignore case
To: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
From: Reinoud Zandijk <reinoud@netbsd.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/30/2002 16:24:43
On Sat, Mar 30, 2002 at 10:01:49AM +0200, Jukka Marin wrote:
> 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.

<snip>

> > 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).

What about a filesystem specific callback function for name comparison?  
then the filesystems who would want such a comparisation done in one way or
another can do it their way... another option would offcource be to specify
a standard comparisation method in the filingsystems structure given to the
kernel.... then `most common' ones can be shared.

> > So what do we do?
> 
> IMHO, it would be better to implement simple case-insensitivity support
> than do nothing.

I agree with this .. allthough i've never had problems myself... lucky 
me...

Cheers,
Reinoud