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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2017-09-21 17:58 GMT+02:00 Manfred Lotz <manfred at dante.de>:

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

I think that ioctl should do it but I have never tried.

>
> -- Manfred
>



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



>
> 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.
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------
> > - 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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