Is HFS really "scary"?

Tabitha McNerney tabithamc at gmail.com
Wed Feb 6 20:04:14 PST 2008


On 2/6/08, Emmanuel Hainry <milosh at macports.org> wrote:
>
> 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.


Well, Emmanuel, if you read my first message on this subject, you can see
that I raised the question about ZFS! I'm not saying that ZFS is the be all
end all, but I do hope that ZFS will continue to progress into Mac OS X 10.6
.

Thanks,

T.M.


OS X is scary ;)
>
>
> Emmanuel
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