Re: Set core.ignorecase globally

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <flatworm@users.sourceforge.net>
Date: Nov 2, 2012, 15:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20121102190337.66a08366de41d29e745b0e4c@domain007.com>
In-Reply-To: <6DB2AD2A-6531-497E-B87E-0E884C4BCFBE@jetbrains.com>

On Fri, 2 Nov 2012 18:39:26 +0400 Kirill Likhodedov <Kirill.Likhodedov@jetbrains.com> wrote:

> Currently, core.ignorecase is set to true on case insensitive system
> like Windows or Mac on `git init` and `git clone`, and this setting
> is local to the created/cloned repository.

[...]

> I suggest to set this globally by default when Git is installed,
> because there is little sense to have this option false on case
> insensitive systems (it will lead to confusions when renaming a file
> by changing only the case of letters).

Case sensitivity is a property of a file system, not the OS. What if I mount a device with ext3 file system via ext2fsd driver in on my Windows workstation? extN have POSIX semantics so it's pointless to enforce case insensitivity on them. The same possibly applies to NFS mounts.

Also note that NTFS (at least by default) is case insensitive but is case preserving, observe:

C:\tmp>dir /b foo

C:\tmp>rename foo Foo

C:\tmp>dir /b Foo

C:\tmp>del fOO

C:\tmp>dir /b

C:\tmp>ver

Microsoft Windows XP [Версия 5.1.2600]

I don't really know what to make out of this, but I'd not change the defaults until the reasons to do this are not really pressing (and they're not for now).