file/dir name case (in)sensitivity

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

We've run into the issue of file and directory name aliasing due to case insensitivity again on KDE-Mac, and that got me thinking again about ways to avoid this while still using the default prefix and keeping the boot partition case-insensitive. AFAIK there are still a number of (commercial) applications that are known to be incompatible with a case-sensitive boot partition (and/or running from one, which can boil down to the same thing). I don't know if Apple has an official guideline on this, so who knows how many other applications out there (even in the App Store) have the same issue.

Personally I've always repartitioned my internal disk and kept my boot partition relatively small (and case-insensitive) so I could have at least 1 case-sensitive partition that holds most of my actual home directory (accessed via symlinks) as well as the actual target of my /opt/local symlink. That works but I know it isn't supported officially.

One reason I'm so interested in ZFS is that it would provide a flexible means to mount a case-sensitive filesystem ("dataset") on /opt/local, one that could actually be a part of a pool that for the rest is mounted under /Volumes (and the nice thing with datasets is that you don't have to decide what size they need to be; they all share the available pool space).

The alternative that doesn't require symlinks or foreign filesystems would be to mount a case-sensitive HFS+ partition on /opt/local or even /opt (so that it can also be used for other things without threspassing). On Linux you'd be able to do that with `mount --bind` which can make part of a partition (a directory) mounted in a standard place available elsewhere.

I don't think OS X provides such a feature (right?) but AFAIK it should be possible to mount a volume on /opt without having it mounted under /Volumes too, but putting the appropriate entry in /etc/fstab .

Would it be worthwhile to figure out and put up an advanced topic describing how to set up MacPorts to use a case-sensitive ${prefix} while still being able to benefit from binary packages?

Cheers,
René