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  • There is no need to go any further than case insensitive filenames. At all. Rolling case insensitive filenames into the same issue is entirely an attempt to make a case against a pet peeve for unrelated reasons.

    This is literally just the same issue. I cannot see what two issues you are separating this into.

    All of this stems from case insensitive file names.

    But you do NOT give up on the functionality or user experience because of the edge cases. You don't design a user interface (and that's what a OS with a GUI is, ultimately) for consistency or code elegance, you design it for usability. Everything else works around that.

    The OS is not the GUI. Every GUI you see in the OS is an application running on top of the actual OS.

    The OS should not arbitrarily decide that some characters are the same as others, it should respect the unified standards for what bytes represent what characters. Unless there is an internationally agreed upon standard for EXACTLY what case insensitive means for every character byte code, then you are building a flawed system that will ruin the user experience when massive bugs and stability issues come up because you didn't actually plan out your system properly to cover edge cases.

    You know, as Linus is pointing out given his multi decade history of running Linux.

    • No, hold on, this is not about the OS.

      This is about whether the filesystem in the OS supports case insensitive names.

      That determines whether the GUI supports case insensitive names down the line, so the choices made by the filesystem and by the OS support of the filesystem must be done with the usability of the GUI in mind.

      So absolutely yes, the OS should decide that some characters are the same as others, not arbitrarily but because the characters are hard to read distinctly by humans and that is the first consideration.

      Or hey, we can go back to making all filenames all caps. That works, too and fully solves the problem.

      • No, hold on, this is not about the OS.

        Holding on.

        This is about whether the filesystem in the OS supports case insensitive names.

        K, now that we're done being pedantic...

        That determines whether the GUI supports case insensitive names down the line, so the choices made by the filesystem and by the OS support of the filesystem must be done with the usability of the GUI in mind.

        Oh yes, let's prioritize making sure that when grandmas are using the raw filesystem they're not confused by case sensitivity, totally worth it over stable, bug-free, secure, software.

        Definitely couldn't have just built grandmas a case insensitive option on the user portion of the file system instead of introducing bugs and edges cases into literally every single piece of software they might use...

        • OK, no, but yes, do that.

          Yes, prioritize making sure that grandmas are not confused by case sensitivity over bug-free secure software. That's correct.

          Also do that robustly in the user layer. Why not? That's cool as well.

          I am a bit confused about how you suggest implementing a file system where two files can have the same user-facing name in document names, file manager paths, shortcuts/symlinks, file selectors and everywhere else exposed by the user without having the file system prevent two files with the same case-insensitive name existing next to each other. That seems literally worse in every way and not how filenames are implemented in any filesystem I've ever used or known about. I could be wrong, though.

          Point is, I don't care. If you figure out a good implementation go nuts.

          But whatever it is, it NEEDS to make sure grandma will never see Office.exe and office.exe next to each other in the same directory. Deal?

116 comments