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Re: find-library-name fails if file (with no extension) exists.


From: Lennart Borgman
Subject: Re: find-library-name fails if file (with no extension) exists.
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:59:15 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 (Windows/20061025)

David Kastrup wrote:
Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

David Kastrup wrote:

It is not even possible to write code with a reasonable chance of
working reliably since one can have Windows and Unix file systems on
the same system and export either with Samba or NFS or a number of
other ways.
If (a very big IF perhaps) Samba, NFS etc preserves the case of file
names in each export and the software is written with the possibility
of both case sensitive and case insensitive file systems in mind it
seems possible to me.

Or am I missing something there?

You can't decide that two file names might indicate the same file
without doing an actual file operation.  You can't decide whether
writing a file would conflict with an existing file without actually
doing the write (and asking the operating system to fail in case the
file exists).  You can't really base any decision on existing file
names.  As a rule of thumb, if there is a possibility for a race
condition, there is a possibility for filename aliasing trouble.  And
not every potential race condition is a problem.

Things like file name completion are simply something which is
impossible to get right.


But does not that depend on the use of file names? If file names are choosen so that they work on both case insensitive and case sensitive system are there then any problems? At least that has been the problem in the cases I have seen. Most often the problem has actually been that someone writing on a case sensitive file system forgot to take care of this. (That is of course an easy mistake to make.)

I am aware of the cases you mentioned to Juanma where there really are no way to do lowercase/uppercase certain letters. Could not they be handled (and are they not already handled) as different letters even though they outside the computer world may look at uppercase/lowercase variants of the same letter?




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