Looking at case insensitivity - question

[Gábor Farkas]

Jens Alfke wrote:
> 
> On 17 Apr '08, at 5:05 AM, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> 
>> Ok. I think it is obvious that I'm strongly biased and speaking as 
>> Unix user.
> 
> I'm a Unix user too, and strongly biased the other way (because my Unix 
> is Mac OS X, which also defaults to a case-insensitive filesystem.)
> I think we can agree that case-sensitive filesystems are more convenient 
> for software development. But case-insensitive ones make more sense to 
> non-geeky end-users

i keep hearing this argument, and i think it's wrong.

this argument usually goes like:

my grandma will not understand, that
"apple pie.txt" and "Apple pie.txt" are different files.

the truth is, that "grandma" people will also mostly not understand that 
the following files are different:

"apple pie.txt"
"apple-pie.txt'
"apple_pie.txt"
"apple<NO-BREAK SPACE>pie.txt"
"The apple pie.txt"
"apple pie.doc"
"apple pie.xls"

so until the filesystem can solve all these problems,
i think it's better for the filesystem not to try to be too clever, when 
it cannot be clever enough.


gabor