Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 18 Feb 2004 09:48:17 +1100 | Subject | Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity | From | tridge@samba ... |
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Neil,
> I thought the value of a case-insensitive filenames was for > legacy applications which have been written to the WIN32 API and took > lots of liberties with "pretty-casing" filenames between readdir and > open.
No, thats a common misconception. It does happen (the "pretty-casing") but its relatively rare these days. The real problem is *proving* that a file doesn't exist. If a file does exist then there are all sorts of heuristic and cache mechanisms that can be used to get the real filename quickly on average, but if you have to prove absolutely that a file does not exist then all of that stuff is pretty much useless.
Samba (and any other system that wants case-insensitive semantics on Linux) can't make do with "oh, it probably doesn't exist". That way leads to data loss. You have to know with 100% certainty that the file doesn't exist in any case combination.
Unfortunately, that is also the hardest thing to do.
Cheers, Tridge - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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