Is HFS really "scary"?

[Jochem Huhmann]

On 2008-02-06, at 21:13, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

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

I think no one really objects against the user interface being case  
insensitive. This clearly is a feature, not a bug. But having this  
feature implemented in the file system seems like only a small piece  
of the right problem solved by messing around in the entirely wrong  
place.

There's no way to take that further (in the file system) by  
integrating even more useful fuzziness like recognizing "f" for "ph",  
or ignoring accents or whatever. If you're dealing with international  
users a case insensitive file system may save you a few rounds for  
figuring out "Fluffy" against "fluffy", but you'd still have to  
figure out "exposé" against "expose" or "foto" against "photo" and  
there is no way to solve that at file system level. Case is only a  
small part of the actual problem. This is clearly something that has  
to be dealt with in the UI libraries and not in the file system. And  
this is the reason why many people feel that a case insensitive file  
system is a ill-conceived hack. You can't really expect to deserve  
praise for painting yourself into a corner...


Just my €0.02,

	Jochem