On 4/13/10 9:14 PM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
It is now very trivial for anyone using current Mac OS X (i.e. in Snow Leopard and newer) to re-partition even their start-up disk and create a partition with an HFS+ filesystem that has the case-sensitive option turned on. Disk Utility allows any remaining free space to be split off into a separate partition and at that point one can choose the options for the filesystem that will occupy the new partition. (Unfortunately UFS2 is not an option, nor I guess will ZFS ever be an option either.) (Sadly, and for reasons I cannot quite imagine, an existing filesystem cannot be made to be case-sensitive, so you can't change your startup partition without re-installing.)
The problem with this approach is one I encountered when I began using pkgsrc on OS X a few years ago. I noticed (I think with Tiger) that I was allowed to format the system with case sensitivity. For me it was the obvious choice and I did it. pkgsrc worked well.
Then I needed to use some Adobe products (Photoshop et al) for work. Their installers failed miserably due to case sensitivity. I battled as much as I could, but in the end they won; the Adobe stuff didn't work right and was too hard to maintain on disk images etc. I had to revert to case insensitivity and use --ignore-case-check for the bootstrap.
So while it's great that Apple supports case sensitivity, I think many Application vendors (who should know better) don't give a crap! And that doesn't bode well for pkgsrc in this case.
Louis