On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>
> > 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. :-)
>
> There was a long thread on this on comp.unix.programmer. The most
> compelling reason I've heard not to bother to try to support
> case-insensitivity, is that the make rules get borked (.C vs. .c, .S
> vs. .s). <URI:news:r6%58.60$7J2.221549@burlma1-snr2>.

That's not really a problem with hfs. While hfs ignores case for lookup,
it preserves case for creation. So if you create foo.C, it will always be
foo.C. It will be found if you look for [fF][oO][oO].[cC], but it will
always be foo.C.

This only would be a problem if you had both a foo.c and foo.C (or foo.s
and foo.S).

From asking around, I confirmed that recent FAT file systems (ones that
are more than 8.3) also are case insensitive but preserve case. So
programs are in the same boat there too.

Take care,

Bill