Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

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And then, you receive a zip file from Linus that has file.c, File.c and FILE.c files on it. You extract it, and then? They either end up on disk, breaking your case-insensitive UI layer (yes, you can see those files, but can you copy them elsewhere?), or they don't, breaking the makefile that's also in the archive. Here be dragons.

Locale-specific ordering of course _must_ be done outside the disk because disks may move between systems with different locales, locales can be changed at will, and multiple users could read the same directory with different active locales (well, must: one could store a locale for sorting per directory and force that on he user, but that is madness)

Also, reading http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.ht... (which I can't find anymore on Apple.com), HFS+ doesn't quite use full NFD because it sometimes destroys information that Apple deemed worth keeping.

Creating three files named file.c, File.c, and FILE.c seems like being user hostile for the sake of being user hostile. Even for people using a case sensitive filesystem, it's a dick move. Imagine talking about your project over the phone. "Yeah, the problem is in file.c. No, not File.c, file.c. Idiot! I clearly said file.c, not FILE.c!"

Yeah, I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do even if you can do it.

I've seen both Makefile and makefile in one archive.

Which is pretty ridiculous. Convention dictates that people use Makefile so that's the file people read and edit, yet the make utility reads makefile first by default. Including both is a great way to confuse users.

Yep. It definitely had that effect on me :)

In fact, the ATK [1] source tarball does have two files differing only in the first letter. One starts with lower case and the other with upper. I came across this while extracting the tarball on Windows - 7zip asked me mid-extract to confirm overwriting an existing file.

Thankfully the files are just (auto-generated) documentation files, so the loss of one file doesn't break the build or anything.

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/atk/

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