[ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated [experimental]: coreutils-6.9-5

Corinna Vinschen corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com
Wed Aug 22 09:18:00 GMT 2007


On Aug 21 15:47, Eric Blake wrote:
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> According to Reini Urban on 8/21/2007 3:26 PM:
> >> This is a minor patch release.  It attempts to add some
> >> case-insensitivity
> >> smarts to mv, cp, and install.  In other words, 'mv a A' should now cause
> >> the file to be renamed, rather than reporting an error, if 'a' and 'A'
> >> happen to be case-insensitive synonyms for the same file.
> > 
> > Great, thanks!
> > Are you planning to submit the patch upstream?
> 
> My patch turned out to be more invasive than I would have liked.  Also,
> there have been upstream discussions on the problem (since Mac HFS, and
> even Linux mounts to FAT, are also affected).  The biggest problem is that
> my patch uses <sys/cygwin.h>, which is NOT portable - there really is no
> good way (at the moment) across all three platforms to tell if a directory
> is case-insensitive.  It would be nice if there was a pathconf(directory,
> _PC_CASE_INSENSITIVE) that could quickly be queried to see if
> case-insensitivity is even worth worrying about for the directory in
> question.  Also brought up on the coreutils list is the problem that the
> kernel's notion of file system case-insensitivity may be different from
> the current locale's definition of case-insensitivity (not really an issue
> for cygwin so long as we don't really support locales, but definitely an
> issue for Linux and Mac).

Dunno if that's helpful for the discussion, but on second (third?)
thought, *maybe* it's not a boundless good idea to manage
case-insensitivity generically in coreutils without explicit OS support
like the above _PC_CASE_INSENSITIVE flag for pathconf.

First, a simple test with FAT on Linux shows that case-insensitivity of
the underlying file system is not necessarily handled correctly by the
OS.  On Linux, rename("a", "A") is a no-op on FAT, according to the
POSIX rule that rename is a no-op if src and dest are hardlinks to the
same file(*).  To fix this behaviour in coreutils, it would be necessary
to *know* that the underlying FS is case-insensitive (is there any flag
to exchange between Linux kernel and FS driver?  I don't know), and to
rename the file in two steps (a -> $tmpname -> A).

Second, even if a FS appears case-insensitive, it isn't necessarily so.
NTFS is case-sensitive.  The case-insensitivity is actually handled by
the Windows kernel.  Basically, a flag in calls to functions taking a
filename as parameter is all it takes to make a function call
case-insensitive or not(**).  The Win32 calls all use case-insensitivity.
Some are switchable to work case-sensitive, but it's not of much help
since other calls are always case-insensitive.  Cygwin handles all file
system calls case-insensitive, too.  So far.

So, in the Linux/FAT example we have a case-sensitive OS with a
case-insensitive FS, with Win32/NTFS (Cygwin/NTFS) we have a
case-insensitive OS with a case-sensitive FS.  While the NT kernel can
return information about the case-sensitivity of the underlying FS (***)
(****), I don't know about other OSes.

So we're back to fpathconf(_PC_CASE_INSENSITIVE): It appears that
case-insensitive operation on the POSIX application level depends on
such a flag.  I'm also planning to allow case-sensitive operation on
NTFS in Cygwin at one point, which would make this flag necessary as
well.  I don't think it would ever become part of the POSIX standard,
though.


Corinna



(*)   In theory, Cygwin's rename could do the same and still move within
      POSIX rules, no matter how frustrating this behaviour might be.

(**)  Plus a registry setting since XP.

(***) See the FILE_CASE_SENSITIVE_SEARCH file system flag:
      http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2007-08/msg00013.html

(****) As far as the underlying FS returns the correct flags, of course.

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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