Re: [gmane.emacs.bugs] Emacs fails to start properly if the current working directory is on a vfat or ntfs filesystem

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Cc: Chong Yidong <address@hidden>,  address@hidden
> Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:33:08 +0100
> 
> A similar problem would be filename completion.  We have separate code
> paths for that in Windows/Unix I believe, even though on MacOSX, the
> file system tends to be case insensitive, too (and normalizing utf-8
> composed characters in some manner).
> 
> If we could design some sort of system call sequence that worked out
> insensitivity/normalizing agnostic, this would mean that on a typical
> GNU/Linux system which can mount various foreign file system types,
> everything would work out according to expectations.
> 
> That would seem to be preferable to #ifdef and its ilk.  I think,
> however, that stuff like the "\\" directory separator can be system
> rather than file system dependent.

I believe you are talking about expand-file-name, because
file_name_completion is almost devoid of OS-dependent #ifdef's.

As for expand-file-name, the #ifdef's there are mostly due to the
different semantics of file names: backslashes and drive letters, and
also to the fact that ~user is not supported.  Most of these will have
to stay OS-dependent, I think.