[tex-live] behaviour of kpsewhich on case-insensitive mac system

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hello,

personally I prefer case sensitivity but we do not live in such an ideal
world ensuring that it works Nelson described clearly the problem and I add
one more. Assume you commit a directory with two files the names of which
differ in case only to a versioning system. The a user tries to
checkout/clone (depending on the type of the VCS) the directory to a case
insensitive system and it fails. Even some names may be invalid, for
instance ptype.txt is invalid in OS/2 (ptype was an abbreviation for
property type and my colleagues had to rename the file so that I could
checkout the repo in OS/2).

File systems nowadays support Unicode but there are still FSs wothoout such
a support. If I get a zip file created on a non-Unicode system, I have
problems because

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz

2017-09-21 15:57 GMT+02:00 Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda <
cereda.paulo at gmail.com>:

> 'ello,
>
> I usually favour case sensitivity to be the norm, mostly because it makes
> things simpler (grain of salt here) by ensuring a deterministic result,
> i.e, the result maps 1:1 what we were looking for without potential traps
> and/or pitfalls.
>
> That said, case insensitivity is also interesting towards sanitising
> results (more salt please), i.e, "john" still refers to "John" which might
> be a good thing. However, there's a huge room for interpretation here.
> Also, I am not sure how sorting would be in these situations. I like to
> favour lexicographic rules most of the time, but when we ignore case, we
> are losing a potential significant information.
>
> In conclusion, nothing can be drawn for here (except the fact that I am
> trying to divert myself from writing a thesis). :) My suggestion is to keep
> things as they are, so we save energy and effort: entia non sunt
> multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. :)
>
> Cheerio!
>
> Paulo
>
>
> Em 21-09-2017 09:46, Nelson H. F. Beebe escreveu:
>
>> Manfred Lotz <manfred at dante.de> writes on Wed, 20 Sep 2017 20:48:37
>> +0200 about checking for a case-preserving filesystem:
>>
>> ...
>>>> Is there time to check the case sensitivity of the filesystem by
>>>> running
>>>>
>>>>     touch   some_weird_name
>>>>     touch   SOME_WEIRD_name
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>
>> Let us remember that such things are a property of the filesystem,
>> rather than the O/S.  Thus, such a check cannot be done at configure
>> time, but only at run time, and then only in the same filesystem where
>> the question needs to be answered.  However, the touch command will
>> fail if that filesystem is mounted read-only.
>>
>> At our large site (18K+ users), for performance reasons, our
>> thin-client servers get read-only nightly copies of much shared
>> software in local directory trees.  On other systems, ZFS snapshots
>> may be distributed to secondary and tertiary servers, and then
>> NFS-mounted from there by client machines: they too, being snapshots,
>> are read-only.
>>
>> Thus, the problem of single-case vs case-insensitive vs
>> case-insensitive + case-preserving vs case sensitive filesystem
>> variants is not easy to deal with automatically by tools like tlmgr
>> and TeX input commands.
>>
>> When I find filename lettercase conflicts in user (La)TeX files, I
>> point out to them the necessity of consistent filenaming conventions,
>> the easiest to remember being to downcase everything, except for two
>> files: Makefile and README.  I also point out that spaces, and
>> punctuation other than a single dot, should be avoided in filenames,
>> and that while modern systems handle Unicode characters above the
>> ASCII limit of U+007F, older ones, and many software tools, do not.
>> Then there is the issue of filename length issues as well, 8 + 3, 31,
>> 63, 127, 255, ...  What a mess.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------------------
>> - Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254
>>       -
>> - University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148
>>       -
>> - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail:
>> beebe at math.utah.edu  -
>> - 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org
>> beebe at computer.org -
>> - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL:
>> http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> -------------------
>>
>>
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