[RFC] case sensitivity on Windows

[Enrique Ramirez]

Any progress or ideas on the subject?

// --------------------------------------
Enrique Ramirez Irizarry
Lead Developer
Indie Code Labs
http://www.indiecodelabs.com



On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 9:35 PM, Mark Hammond <mhammond at skippinet.com.au> wrote:
>> So at present you have a method which, given a name in arbitrary case,
>> tells you what case it actually has on disk.  It seems like we also
>> need a method which, given a name in arbitrary case, looks up that
>> name in the tree.  I don't think this exists yet, and it probably has
>> to, because the inventory and tree code at present is case sensitive.
>> We can't just use the first because in general the case present on
>> disk is not the same as what's used in memory.
>>
>> I can think of a few ways to tackle this: one is to have the
>> inventory/tree code have a 'mode' (conceptually a bit on the object;
>> possibly actually composition with a different object) that tells it
>> to do everything case-insensitively.
>
> I've started looking into this and I'm a little lost :(  As a first step, I
> thought a version of path2id which ignores the case of the path would work,
> which you could then pass back to id2path to get the 'canonical' name in the
> inventory.  I've a couple of problems with this approach:
>
> * Adding this method to tree.py is easy - but its not clear that will
> actually be used.
>
> * Adding this method to workingtree_4 is a little tricker - it probably
> means we need to add that capability to diststate._get_entry() - but that
> method is hairy!
>
> * As you imply above, this may not be enough: we probably need almost *all*
> of the path matching methods on the tree to ignore the case on such
> file-systems (ie, the "mode" you describe), so, eg, 'bzr status' will ignore
> the case of the file on the file-system and just match the inventory.  But
> this is harier still!!
>
> Any advice for how this could best be implemented?  Would it help if I
> published my branch under the bzr project on launchpad so others could help
> with the hacking?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark.
>
>
>