From: Tomas Carnecky <tom@dbservice.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:52:15 GMT
Subject: Re: Can't handle renamed resources on case insensitive filesystems.
Message-ID: <4B26511F.5040804@dbservice.com>
In-Reply-To: <63135FDB-C8EF-4DBC-AEF5-4B0636C8D349@gmail.com>

On 12/14/09 3:27 PM, Lhunath (Maarten B.) wrote:
> GIT has quite a few issues concerning renamed files on case insensitive filesystems, such as Mac OS X's default HFS+.
>
> For instance:
>
> lhunath@Myst t $ git mv Foo foo
> fatal: destination exists, source=Foo, destination=foo
>
> Moreover, when a repository contains Foo and foo in one commit and in a subsequent commit, "foo" is removed; "Foo" will also disappear when checking out the latter.
>
> Most of these issues are likely just a result of the underlying file system's handling of GIT's commands; though considering that Mac OS X's default fs is case insensitive by default, and the Mac and Windows userbases combined are quite large; it might be very much appropriate to do a check for this (if needed) and handle renames (and other operations?) in a way that they would not cause conflicts on these file systems (eg. rename to a temporary filename first and then rename to destination).
>
> In particular; these issues make it awfully painful to refactor Java class names from things like JndiUtils ->  JNDIUtils.  Not only is it hard to get the commit INTO the repository correctly; it is also hard to check the commit OUT for somebody who has no idea any of this is needed.--

Create a disk image and format it with case-sensitive HFS+, create a new 
partition and format it with case-sensitive HFS+, or reinstall Mac OS X 
and choose case-sensitive HFS+ as the filesystem for the system partition.

After I found out that the default install of Mac OS X uses 
case-insensitive filesystem, the first thing I did was reinstall the OS.

tom