On Monday, May 5, 2003, at 08:50 Europe/Rome, John Gordon wrote:
> Hello,
>
>> I do not expect this to be a popular viewpoint.  I do not expect it to
>> be the one the Project will adopt; I'm not even sure it's one the
>> Project _should_ adopt.  But you asked. :-)
>
> I guess it really depends on whether the goal of the build system is 
> to be able
> to build anywhere, or just anywhere that it works without imposing 
> even the
> simplest of restrictions on the programmer ;-)

MacOS (also X, and darwin) have the same problem on HFS/HFS+,
and I went into it when porting ircu (undernet's ircd), it was simply a
directory called "Configure" where a "configure" script existed...

IMHO OSes should not be so lame about file names, but a "portable"
cross-build system should definitively stick to "the minimum that
works everywhere", and on the other side there are user's point of
view reasons for these "barbarisms" (I have seen people getting
crazy on OSX because they saw 3 "documents" with the same
name in  a "folder", which actually where Invoice.doc invoice.doc
and invoice.xls)

The problem with this principle is that we should then stick to 8+3/
no-special-symbols/unique-caseless names... and that would not
be a "minor" change.

Essentially 1/2 of the file names should change to make the thing
really "portable": do we want to push the "build anywhere" principle
to that ? I guess no.

Fixing the case problem would gain Windoze and OSX in one shot
though... and that's a good thing (tm).


Ciao,

A.