Case-insensitive filesystem lookups

The problem with making the filesystem 'smart' is that the applications which use the filesystem must be able to understand the smartness. In other words, making interacting with files complicated to achieve complicated user goals will introduce bugs across all programs.

I can't tell you the number of awful hacks I've had to do in order to deal with the strange behavior of OS X, where the filename you use to create a file is not guaranteed to be the filename of the file later. Putting this level of intelligence into the raw filesystem interface usually leads to these kinds of problems.

One thing is for sure, if you want to go down this road, filenames will have to have explicit encoding and locale info.