On Tue, 8 Mar 2011, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
On 03/08/2011 05:53 PM, Michael Hennebry wrote:
Whether yum and rpm should be case-sensitive and whether file
systems should be case-sensitive are distinct questions.
Agreed.
Besides this, on many systems, case-insensitivity is less a feature, but
a side-effect of history and/or limitations of the implementation :/
An ascii names-only file system could probably be case insensitive.
Though some users may find case-insensitive files systems useful, they
impose problems in many other occasions, e.g. to programming and scripting.
Classic situation: User tells a program to "save to xxxx.txt", but
filesystem generates "XXXX.txt" - Which file should a
shell-script/makefile expect?
There is also foo.c, foo.C, bar.s and bar.S .
As others have noted, non-English languages would present problems.
Correct - Another classic example: Try to capitalize a German 'Ã'
("sharp S" - Until recently it did not have a captialization, and even
though it officially has one, nobody uses it)
For all I know, some English variants might also.
As I see it, within the current system,
a case-insensitive variant of rpm would:
collect all the names from the various repositories.
hash them in a case-insensitive manner
hash user-provided names in the same manner
perform case-insensitive and case sensitive compares
Is that practical?
No ... it would severely complicate things.
By "practical",
I was thinking in terms of the amount of work required of the computers.
Whether the result would be useful is a separate issue.
What could be practical is equipping yum or other front ends with some
more "intelligence"/"heuristics" when checking user requests.
Perhaps, but it wouldn't solve the problem under discussion.
--
Michael hennebry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Optimist: The glass is half full.
Engineer: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
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