Is HFS really "scary"?

Emmanuel Hainry milosh at macports.org
Wed Feb 6 14:04:05 PST 2008


Citando Jordan K. Hubbard :
> On Feb 6, 2008, at 11:37 AM, James Sumners wrote:
>
>> These things would probably get fixed Macs shipped with the case
>> sensitive filesystem installed. Personally, I was quite surprised that
>> the filesystem was case insensitive when I got my first Mac (a
>> PowerBook three years ago).
> 
> That's probably never going to happen.  When you're dealing with grandma 
> on the phone and she's saying "I can't open my file named ``fluffy!''", 
> the last thing you need is to go 10 rounds trying to figure out whether 
> she actually named it Fluffy, fluffY or FlUFfY. 

And what about Phlufy, fluphie, phluffy, phluffie, phluphe and so on? Is
the FS really supposed to correct your filename so that your grandma can
use a computer on the phone?

> That is why case 
> insensitivity was added in the first place (and believe me, it was a lot 
> more work than being case sensitive).

Really, then I don't understand why other old fs were case insensitive,
was it not because the names were just recorded without any case? 

> At least modern Macs allow you to select case sensitivity as an option, 
> vs having to know (as you did in the past) that this meant "UFS" instead 
> of HFS (and all the problems that switching filesystem types entirely 
> came with).

The fact is that using HFSX instead of HFS+ for MacOSX comes with a lot
of problems too (most of them are not Apple's fault however).

Using HFS or HFS+ causes problems for some unix stuff who want to have a
directory and a file with the same name apart from the case.

Using UFS for MacOSX is Humm, I don't know if it is not an option or
just a bad idea.

OS X is scary ;)


Emmanuel


More information about the macports-users mailing list