Is HFS really "scary"?

[Tabitha McNerney]

On 2/7/08, Jochem Huhmann <joh at revier.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.


I might not be popular for asking this question but what does Microsoft do
for its NTFS file system? For example, is NTFS case insensitive for Windows
XP Home but case sensitive for Windows XP Professional? (similar for their
confusing Vista OSs)?

I think it is reasonable to expect that Microsoft also has to deal with
"Grandma" as Jordan stated, but Microsoft also has to deal with the
professional market.

Thanks,

T.M.


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
>
>
>
>
>
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