Re: Cygwin: problem with renaming and case

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 21, 2008, 18:09 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0803211105190.3020@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130803211057h22310557ne605e39e6b894e11@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008, Avery Pennarun wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> I don't know if this helps, but if git would delete the files it's 
> planning to forget before checking the existence of files it's planning 
> to create, case sensitivity problems like these would automatically 
> disappear and you wouldn't have to worry about case (and accent, and 
> and...) folding by hand.

Yeah, but the whole logic of git-read-tree (which is what does this all) is to verify everything is up-to-date and a-ok before doing anything to your filesystem. Which is just a good idea in general.

Basically, we don't want to do something part-way, and then notice later that "oh, but.." and have to try to undo the thing we did partially.

So I agree, in this case the "remove files that go away first" would work around the problem, and we could look into whether that is reasonable in some cases, but in general it's not trivial either.

My personal guess is that it's probably better to start teaching git about case-broken filesystem, even if we start it with some common special case rather than getting every case right from the beginning.

		Linus