Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting
Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting
- Subject: Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting
- From: John Timmer <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2001 13:21:45 -0400
This has already been beaten to death on the Darwin lists. To stop the
bandwidth waste of a similar flogging here, i'll summarize:
This is not going to be "fixed" in HFS; rather, the suggested fix would
break HFS from the perspective of the majority of users, at least according
to some folks at Apple.
HFS is a file system meant for average desktop users. An average desktop
user doesn't want his filesystem telling him that "letter to Mom" doesn't
exist because he didn't capitalize mom. He just wants to keep typing his
letter. To borrow an example from another OS, the average desktop user
doesn't want to remember that it's Xconfigurator, rather than xConfigurator,
Xconfigurator, etc. They just want to change the resolution on their
monitor.
That's not to say that there aren't situations where case considerations are
important, or that case sensitivity wouldn9t be useful for some developers.
But in the majority of situations, enforcing case sensitivity only slows the
average user down, and developers are clever enough to work around it.
JT
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Or if you want to use the filenames by some reasonable way. Once upon a time
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I've written a dictionary application which stored the word and phrase
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definitions in files, whose names were those very words and phrases -- for
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the particular app's needs (based on vocabulary size, average size of the
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definition etc.) it was an optimal solution.
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Well I do understad that Mac OS programmers could never get used to that,
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taking into account those grave limitations it forced upon filenames (what's
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some 32 chars, anyway?!?), but since those problems are finally gone, the
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last one of them (which is the inability to work properly with different
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letter cases) should go, too.