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

[Manfred Lotz]

Nelson,
Do you know if filesystems provide an API call to query their
capabilities? I don't know of anything like this. 

-- Manfred

On Thu, 21 Sep 2017 06:46:25 -0600
"Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:

> 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.
> 
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