Sorry, but a filesystem that doesn't preserve exactly what I put into it is broken.
And the only chronology I mentioned was my surprise that Windows is still broken, even in it's latest iteration (Vista).
I am glad that I only have to deal with Microsoft product on an extremely occasional basis. I feel sorry for people who are so emotionally invested in their operating system that they can't see that OpenBSD is the answer... ;-)
> Sorry, but a filesystem that doesn't preserve exactly what I put into it is broken.
I work with non-hackers, non-computer people who use computers as tools. They are constantly surprised that Linux does make a distinction between cases. They remember the words they used as the names of documents, letters, reports, etc., and they don't want to have to remember whether it was capitalised or not.
Dictating names of documents becomes a chore when you have to specify the capitalisation. Just the other day my wife was trying to find a submission of mine here on HN and ended up phoning me in frustration, exactly because the system remembers/keeps exactly what was put into it.
Your attitude, quite rightly here for a hacker, is that you want the system to do exactly what you want. For entrepreneurs and others who deal with non-hackers, knowing that most of the world don't see things the same way, and occasionally want something "obviously wrong," is important.
Windows does preserve exactly what you put into it, it will never change the case of your files. It will not let you call two files the same name (with different case) and it will not care if you reference a file with the wrong case.
This is utterly brilliant behaviour. Case is a pain to remember and a pain to communicate with other people, it doesn't fit well with our language. You only need to try and read a password to someone to see that. There's also no pleasant way to remember that two files are the same name but different cases.
One of the first things I do when installing linux is set bash to case insensitive tab completion, and vim to case insensitive searching.
You may as well ask for an OS that preserves the speed you typed a filename and wont let you access it unless you match the speed again.
Actually, this is not entirely true. If you use a program called PAX, which is like unix tar, you can get two files with the same case-independent name with different capitalization. This is necessary for posix.
And yes, this is very odd, and apparently not well known. Just as is the fact that from the C-level api, you can use forward slash instead of backslash to separate file name and directory name.
Perhaps the smiley wink ;-) at the end of that sentence might have clued some people in to the fact that it was not meant to be taken completely seriously.
I am both heartened and disappointed by this thread, heartened that a few people came up with reasoned arguments as to the usability benefits of a case-insensitive OS. Disappointed at the far larger number of people who hit the downmod button on comments they disagree with without being able to articulate why they disagree.
I think that the latter behaviour is all too representative of Hacker News of late, unfortunately.
And the only chronology I mentioned was my surprise that Windows is still broken, even in it's latest iteration (Vista).
I am glad that I only have to deal with Microsoft product on an extremely occasional basis. I feel sorry for people who are so emotionally invested in their operating system that they can't see that OpenBSD is the answer... ;-)