Is HFS really "scary"?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Feb 7, 2008, at 2:45 AM, Jochem Huhmann wrote:

> 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...

In that case, let me be clear.  I'm not asking for or expecting  
"praise for HFS" by any means, I was simply trying to explain some of  
the thought processes which evidently went into that first decision to  
make HFS case insensitive.  It was a decision made long ago, well  
before I came to Apple, and maybe it makes sense today, maybe it does  
not.  Those decisions are, in any case, made far above my pay grade  
and I'm not here to apologize for HFS or to suggest that I can affect  
its future roadmap in any way.  This discussion started as a reaction  
to some highly unspecific comments made by Linus, nothing more.

- Jordan