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by ra 4618 days ago
Be wary of using case sensitive FS. Many apps simply don't work on case sensitive.

Maybe they've fixed it, but not long ago the whole Adobe suite just wouldn't work on case sensitive EXT FS.

You should use a convention for your filenames anyway. Eg in Python you always use lower case.

1 comments

The major reason behind the switch is that I recently had to rename a file, that someone accidentally comitted with an uppercase letter. We had to do it on another machine. It's a valid concern though.
At my previous employer, where most developers use Linux, there was a README and a readme with different content in the same directory in a git repository. Loads of fun on case-insensitive OS X, since git always believed some data was removed ;).
The way you phrased it one could assume that it's somehow git's fault ;)
It doesn't completely ignore the case, it just doesn't allow you to have two different files with the same case.

We've had a couple hiccups going from Mac to Linux because of this (if you call a folder 'Assets' and there's already one called 'assets', you're going to get two distinct folders on your Linux server and scratch your head for a while until you figure out why something didn't change), but you mostly don't have to worry too much about it.

mv File _file; mv _file file
I wish it was always that simple.

I don't know about Mac, but once I had a problem that some of the game installers created folder " Games", although "Games" was already there.

Fun time trying to delete or rename to something same this " Games" folder using Windows Explorer, Total commander and command prompt. Each one of them got confused and tried to delete "Games" instead of " Games". At the end, I just fired up lcc, and made a simple C program calling `ulink(" Games");`. And it worked ;)

Well, you can just use a mounted disk image formatted with a case sensitive HFS as development env. You'll need to mount that every time you restart but that's a minor hassle compared to problems you might run into when using a case sensitive FS for your primary partition.
So far - for development - I haven't had any issues with the case sensitive file system. I guess it's because in the end of the day, it's all tools made to work on Linux I use.

If you're using OS X for an all-round machine, it might be the wrong choice.

Apple themselves used to discourage using a case sensitive partition for the OS. It's probably fine, just not the standard and widely tested configuration. The major hassle starts when one single program you need fails because of the setting - you'd just have to reinstall everything. So the safer way is use case insensitive for the primary and have a dedicated space for development with a case sensitive FS.