Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity

[H. Peter Anvin]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>>Well, we don't want to support a bunch of hacks to make it behave like
>>Windows if what Windows does doesn't make sense.
> 
> 
> I'd disagree, for a very simple reason: case-insensitivity itself simply 
> does not make sense, so the _only_ reason for having a bunch of hacks is 
> literally to support windows file exports and nothing else.
> 
> I obviously agree with the fact that we should _not_ put those hacks into 
> the VFS layer proper - we should keep them as a separate thing, and we 
> should make it clear that it makes no sense _except_ for Windows 
> compatibility.
> 
> Think of it as nothing more than a binary compatibility layer, the same 
> way we have hooks to support "lcall 7,0" for binary compatibility with 
> some silly (and much less interesting) x86 OSes through external modules.
> 

Well, this is also true :)  I still say it belongs in userspace.

For 100% bug-compatibility with Windows, though, it is probably
worthwhile to have the filename in the native filesystem be not what a
Windows user would see, but rather the normalized filename.  That makes
a userspace implementation much easier.

	-hpa

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