I am sorry if this is a frequently raised topic, but I have done some web searches for it, including ones limited to netfilter.org, and looked through the past few months of mailing list archives without finding anything about it. netfilter appears to be the only part of the linux kernel that contains file names that differ only by capitalization. I infer from a quick glance at the source tree that the netfilter code currently uses the caplitation to distinguish between "targets" and "matches", which I would assume somehow helps in the readability of iptables output or something like that. File names that collide when compared case insensitively result in errors in the use of TortoiseSVN on Windows clients using a subversion source tree that has a copy of the linux kernel checked in. Although I would welcome tips about some kludge available in TortoiseSVN to work around this problem so that I don't have to admit that Linux is incompatible with the primary client of this particular company's chosen version control system, and have found some discussion of this subversion issue on the net already, the primary point of my letter is that file names that differ only in capitalization in the real world do add a little bit to costs of and potential arguments against linux. Incompatability with our colleagues' case insensitive file systems also impedes software sharing minutely and may erode the inclination of others to accomodate conventions that may make our lives easier (7 bit characters in file names, no spaces, control characters, slashes, semicolons, no files named "..", etc.). I don't expect the netfilter contributors immediately to jump and fix this problem, which I imagine would have implications in user level code and system administration scripts. Rather, I submit it for contributors to contemplate in future planning. For example, perhaps in the future, the FILTERNAME/filtername convention could be migrated to the use of suffixes like filtername_in/filtername_out. Thanks for your time. Adam Richter
