[cvsnt] Re: Linux/Win32 client's and Win2k server

[Anthony Williams]

tmh at nothing-on.tv (Tony Hoyle) writes:

> On 30 Aug 2002 16:38:33 +0100, Anthony Williams
> <anthwil at nortelnetworks.com> wrote:
> 
> >tmh at nothing-on.tv (Tony Hoyle) writes:
> >> It's not a good idea to have the same name with different case.  Win32
> >> clients will treat these as the same file. and Unix clients will treat
> >> them as different.  The server is similar - the NT server will treat
> >> them as the same file and the Unix server will treat them as
> >> different.  So you get confusion in any kind of mixed environment.
> >
> >Would it be possible to modify the CVSNT server to use
> >FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS when opening files, to preserve case? Obviously,
> >this only works on NTFS partitions, but it would allow for the scenario
> >where the clients are all UNIX, and they were used to UNIX servers that
> >supported this.
> 
> If you allow this the first person who tried to checkout the
> repository on a Windows system would get very confused.  

This applies to a UNIX server just as much.

> Plus, Windows
> users are always using different cases when they modify files (since
> they don't see it as significant) - ignoring case is actually quite
> useful in that environment.

Agreed.
 
> There's also the problem of having to rewrite the fopen() functions to
> support it (which is tedious rather than difficult).

True.

> If I did it it'd have to be a configurable option (default off) for
> those that really needed it.

Yes. What'd be nice is an option (the same one) that would make the UNIX port
case-insensitive too, so CVSNT behaved the same irrespective of the server OS.
Of course that would need cooperation from the client software, so it knew
whether SomeFile matched SOMEFILE in the local directory for an
update/merge/checkout; otherwise a user might end up with both, at different
versions, and _that_ would be confusing.

Anthony