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Re: True case-sensitive filenames
- From: Earnie Boyd <earnie_boyd at yahoo dot com>
- To: "Gerald S. Williams" <gsw at agere dot com>
- Cc: cygwin-developers at cygwin dot com
- Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 12:55:25 -0500
- Subject: Re: True case-sensitive filenames
- References: <GBEGLOMMCLDACBPKDIHFOEADDBAA.gsw@agere.com>
- Reply-to: cygwin-developers at cygwin dot com
Gerald S. Williams wrote:
Earnie Boyd wrote:
IMNSHO, the problem is with the project that uses files that differ only
in case. It's not portable, and if the project wishes portability, then
the practice must stop. I urge you to raise an argument with the
package maintainers accompanied with a patch. Changing Cygwin to handle
the problem isn't going to cause these problems to disappear as not all
environments will support it.
Taking the high road, huh? :-)
Of course, many of the people you'd have to convince
would argue that the problem is with Windows.
The argument has nothing to do with Windows vs Unix.
I'm not taking sides on that debate. But I have run
into these naming issues enough times to say that,
for me, it would be really nice to have POSIX naming
as an option.
Nice, but it's still not portable.
Another problem I've run into recently is that the
people who ARE interested in portability are already
taking the trouble to port their package to Windows.
More often than not, this actually interferes with a
Cygwin build, since they start adding WIN32 checks
throughout the code, taking into consideration not
only platform issues but also compiler weirdness. It
would be nice if we can "beat them to the punch" and
have a Cygwin port first. To this end, being able to
deal with such files may give us a head start.
Adding filters for WIN32 shouldn't affect a Cygwin build at all. WIN32
is only defined if you use -mno-cygwin, -mwin32 or include windows.h.
As for compiler specificness, I agree, I've just run into #ifdef
__MSVC__ in a package instead of _WIN32. But again the argument is
portability and nothing else.
Earnie.