from Hacker News

What Mac OS’s case-insensitive filenames teaches us

by paulbjensen on 11/9/19, 10:44 AM with 9 comments

  • by latchkey on 11/9/19, 1:19 PM

  • by mikl on 11/9/19, 12:52 PM

    It’s not just macOS, Windows has the same, with all the same associated problems.

    For that reason, I generally prefer to keep all file names consistently lower-case - user_account.ex over UserAccount.ex. It’s just as easy to read, if not more so.

    We have enough other things to worry about as programmers without having to think about correct capitalisation of file names.

  • by michalc on 11/9/19, 1:14 PM

    I think it also teaches that Postel’s robustness principle isn’t always a good thing.

    If the MacOS filesystem was not case-insensitive, i.e. it was _less_ liberal with what it accepted, the reported issue wouldn’t have happened.

  • by nkristoffersen on 11/9/19, 11:46 AM

    Ran into this issue with CI and git. Was so difficult to track down. Now all Macs on my team are reformatted to be case sensitive because of this. Thankfully it's an option now.

  • by ikrtx on 11/9/19, 11:51 AM

    This is written as if it was some kind of lesson on philosophy. Why were you even using uppercase letters in your file names to begin with?