Subject: Re: Case-insensitive filesystems
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
From: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 02/04/2002 23:09:48
On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 02:00:00PM -0800, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> 
> > Sure, but we're talking about pkgsrc here, which is not one of
> > those things that requires case-preserving-but-ignoring attributes,
> > and, in fact, has harmful side-effects.
> >
> > I really don't see any way around specifying UFS as a pre-requisite,
> > but am certainly open to suggestions.
> 
> For now, requiring UFS sounds fine.
> 
> In the long run though, I think it would be best if we could move to not
> needing it. Because most MacOS X installs won't have it. Most installs
> will be single-filesystem ones, and that fs will be hfs+. So requiring UFS
> will limit pkgsrc's usabilit much more so than on other OSs. :-(

Yes, you are right.
 
> How many places in _our_ part of pkgsrc do we have case conflicts? CVS/cvs
> comes to mind. Any others?

nkf came up earlier. I don't know how many others there are out there.
 
> I realize there are going to be other problems with packages that
> internally won't work because of case problems, but those packages won't
> work on MacOS X anyway. The authors will have to change things to make
> them work. So while I think we could help this, we don't have to do it all
> ourselves. :-)

Sometimes it may just be parts of the build process that require differences
between case in filenames.
 
> Maybe a thing to migrate to would be a package flag that says it needs a
> case-sensitive fs, and a flag that says we have (or don't have) one. That
> way I could for instance say I want only case insensitive packages (and
> have it work on hfs), and you could say you want all packages (and have it
> require ufs).

An excellent suggestion - I like this idea a lot.

Thanks,
Alistair