Re: git: cannot rename foo to Foo on a case-insensitive filesystem (e.g. on Windows)

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Aug 29, 2007, 09:43 UTC
Message-ID: <864piillqs.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
In-Reply-To: <1BA15C6C-1F37-401B-B8D8-4BD147CF5225@wincent.com>

Wincent Colaiuta <win@wincent.com> writes:

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> El 29/8/2007, a las 4:23, Johannes Schindelin escribió:
>
>> On Wed, 29 Aug 2007, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:
>>
>> But it does not change the _meaning_ of Andreas' criticism.  They
>> took a perfectly sane system, and turned it into a mess.
>
> While I agree that most just accept the default, your argument here
> and in your previous email is spurious; it amounts to saying "A and
> B is offered, but because A is the default it is the same as if B
> were not supported at all", which isn't valid logic. If you limited
> your argument to criticizing case-insensitive filesystems then I
> would have to agree with you; I am not a fan of them. Likewise, if
> you said that the default has undesirable consequences I would also
> concur.  It's your attempt to extend your claim to an argument for
> equivalence that I can't buy.

Read up on his posting history.

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>> Plenty of people have this setup
>
> Agreed...
>
>> and we have to suffer.
>
> but, don't you think you're exaggerating a bit here? How much
> "suffering" has this really caused you? I gather that you're not
> even a user of that operating system;

He is the main worker on the MSYS port of git as far as I can tell, while not using Windows as his work platform. So indeed he gets to bear _all_ the pain, and no personal gain. Since I have provided for Windows/MSYS compatibility in AUCTeX's _installation_ procedure (a small part of the project which is mostly operating system agnostic), a much smaller stuff under similar circumstances, I can vouch for the amount of hassle such a seemingly "everything we need should be there in principle" Windows accommodation task causes.

And I actually find it extremely distasteful how little involvement in this project is there from genuine Windows users: most restrict themselves to complaining.

So at least on this account, I think you are not doing him justice.

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> I am (have been since the first developer previews), have always
> accepted the default filesystem choice, don't even like the
> filesystem (have ranted repeatedly about its flakiness on my
> weblog), but I think I've run into case- insensitivity issues two
> times. If you want to talk about "suffering" then ask me about HFS+
> data integrity.

-- 
David Kastrup