Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 28, 2018 16:43 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363)
In reply to: Filesystems and case-insensitivity by sorokin
Parent article: Filesystems and case-insensitivity

> They are a place where programs store some internal data. Kind of (key, value) storage with hierarchical key.

For the SteamOS use case, it's desirable that this lookup can be case-insensitive: game developers typically do most of their testing and development on Windows, where opening "level3.MAP" will successfully find a file named "Level3.map". If the obvious port of that game fails to work on Linux, it makes Linux gaming look bad, and makes porting games to Linux less appealing.

Emulations of case-insensitive enviroments, like Wine and Samba, also need to match the case-insensitive behaviour of the environment they're emulating.

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 28, 2018 20:28 UTC (Wed) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link]

And it can be pointed out that this have actually happened (the Linux version does not start due to case inconsistencies) quite a few times on Steam so it's not just a theoretical problem.

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 28, 2018 21:12 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

It can easily go the other way too: for example I've seen cases where someone created Git branches on Linux which differed only by case. That worked fine for them, but people on MacOS or Windows had difficult-to-understand problems (because Git branches exist as directories/files).