Subject: Re: cygwin coreutils-6.9-5
From: "James Youngman" <[email-masked]>
To: "Eric Blake" <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked], bug-coreutils <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 23:31:00 +0100
List-Id: <cygwin.cygwin.com>

On 8/22/07, Eric Blake <[email-masked]> wrote:
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> Forwarding this conversation from the cygwin lists, as it provides some
> useful information on the recent topic of case insensitivity.
>
> According to Corinna Vinschen on 8/22/2007 2:30 AM:

> > So we're back to fpathconf(_PC_CASE_INSENSITIVE): It appears that
> > case-insensitive operation on the POSIX application level depends on
> > such a flag.  I'm also planning to allow case-sensitive operation on
> > NTFS in Cygwin at one point, which would make this flag necessary as
> > well.  I don't think it would ever become part of the POSIX standard,
> > though.
>
> If _PC_CASE_INSENSITIVE ever did get standardized, it would be merely to
> guarantee existence of the flag, with the caveat that in POSIX it always
> returns false.  But since POSIX does allow implementations to add _PC_*
> flags to pathconf as extensions, I see no harm in implementing it even
> without specification.

If applications are supposed to be able to use _PC_CASE_INSENSITIVE to
figure out if rename("a","A") should be a no-op, then there is an
assumption that the kernel and the userspace have identical ideas
about case conversion (that is whether the source and destination file
names differ only by case).   I'm not sure how that could happen.

James.

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