Re: Possible bug with branch names and case sensitivity

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 23, 2011, 20:50 UTC
Message-ID: <CACBZZX4qs8-u33bZbrxYS1CrwjTQc=4YOk2SUjtYzL=vc9KYgA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAG+J_DxREbykWggrD49L7qvR9M36wKL7+_kOYbvcWmLBCF2Gog@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 18:31, Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com> wrote:

> I wonder what the downside would be of always using packed refs on
> case-insenstive file systems. This would seem analogous to how git no
> longer uses symlinks.

Note that Git doesn't only have confusing behavior with refs on case-insensitive filesystems. The other day HFS+ users @ work had issues because of a case collision in the checked out tree, which confused git status et al.

Note that HFS+ in particular is case-insensitive *but* case preserving. E.g.:

    $ touch Foo; perl -wle 'opendir my $d, "."; print while readdir
$d; -f and print "yes" for qw(foo Foo FOO)'
    .
    ..
    Foo
    yes
    yes
    yes

On case-insensitive and not-case-preserving systems the third line would usually print either "foo" or "FOO", but on HFS+ the system preserves the original name.

This means that you can in some cases figure out what's going on by doing a readdir() in addition to a stat() as you could do on POSIX-compliant systems.