Martin Husemann writes:

> 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.
> 
> 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.

I struggle to think of any application apart from Samba that would
appreciate this, or any non-Samba situation where it would be
desirable.  Even if you are running Samba, do you really want to
present a case-insensitive interface somewhere in your file system to
your other applications?

Yes it probably would speed up Samba, but if Samba needs to be
modified to take advantage of it anyway, perhaps there's another
cleaner way to do it?

> Some filesystems would force this flag (amigafs, msdosfs).
> I vaguealy remember some PRs about i.e. msdosfs that would be magically
> solved this way.

Surely this isn't necessary?  At least in the case of 'msdosfs' the
file system supports case, it's just other operating systems that
treat it as case insensitive.

Somehow this all seems more process dependent than file system
dependent.  Perhaps Wine (yeah, I thought of another one) and Samba
would benefit from seeing all filesystems as case insensitive, or
perhaps they want more fine-grained control.

But most applications (and my brain) don't really want the rules to
suddenly change on them in the middle of the file system...

Cheers,

Dave