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Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

This is just Linux grumping about subjective tastes—he rags on the default case sensitivity of HFS+ and the finder, neither of which he's forced to use even if he's stapled to a mac. If you want a case sensitive filesystem, reformat your damn mac! I've seen it confuse enough non-computer savvy people I wouldn't want Apple to change their filesystem for the sake of developers who need to distinguish between headers by case.

NB: I use a case-sensitive HFS+ install for cross-compiling when it's necessary.

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Don't underestimate the power of defaults.

Also, this can trip up in several other contexts besides headers. For instance, someone renames a file in their repository, changing just a filename case. And then you'll have to scratch your head a bit to understand a git issue that will invariably arise when you pull in the changes. Unless you are fortunate enough not to have a deadline, you won't be so quick to reformat the machine.

This actually happened to me. In the end, it was quicker to spin up a linux vm than to reformat the machine.

EDIT: Also, you appear to have missed the part that says "There is a case sensitive option, but Apple actively hides it and doesn't support it." No support is really, really, really bad. Noone will deploy OSX machines formatted like that if it is unsupported.

I'm not saying reformat the machine, I'm saying don't depend on case sensitivity if you use a default configured mac. And if you do depend on it, don't use the default configuration of the mac. How hard is this to figure out? It's not like case sensitivity is inherently desirable or better, especially for source code, where I would argue it's actively confusing and a huge code smell.

OS X is primarily a consumer's OS. Every time a decision has to be made between making the life of the programer or the consumer easier, Apple will choose the latter.

On iOS, Apple made a consumer-unfriendly change when they disabled virtual printing, e.g. local Print-to-PDF from any application to a virtual-printer app.

Except that a case-sensitive HFS+ file system breaks tons of Mac apps that are never tested with it.

A few examples:

- Creative Suite http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensitiv...

- Steam https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8601-RYP...

- Unity http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fatal-error-case-sensitive-...

Mac apps not running on case sensitive filesystems is probably more common than not.

Well, most users are not developers and will not need to use a case sensitive filesystem.

I think you mean Linus, not Linux.

While tastes are certainly subjective, the exploit caused by this brain damaged design was not subjective, nor a matter of taste.

The exploit was not "caused" by HFS+. It was caused by either not knowing or not caring that HFS is a case-insensitive file system.

> that HFS is a case-insensitive file system.

...by default.

It's subjective. HFS+ is perfectly capable of being case-sensitive if necessary, so it's not a fault of the filesystem. He's just griping about the default configuration of developer machines. News flash: if you're a developer, you may have to think about how your computer is configured. You might as well complain how some linux distros don't come with emacs installed and calling it 'brain damaged design' because it isn't what you want.

What about normalization, which by the way, isn't actually NFD — it's just very similar to it?

As the primary author of the most widely used cross platform VCS, he does have to use OSX.

> As the primary author of the most widely used cross platform VCS, he does have to use OSX.

Sure, but he doesn't need to bitch about things just to bitch about things... it's not like case sensitivity is a problem for anything but poorly designed build systems.

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