[pmwiki-users] Re: case-insensitive file names (Was: How use lowercase in Group Names)

[chr at home.se]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 09:36:02AM +0200, chr at home.se wrote:
> > > On a case-insensitive filesystem such as Windows, there's 
> > > absolutely no choice in the matter -- DrM.DrM is the same 
> > > page as DRM.DRM.
> > 
> > With the current implementation, sure. But my naive thinking is that
> > implementing something that could handle it isn't too diffcult.  You could
> > for instance maintain a separate file that maps page names to page files.
> > The penalty would be that you have to read this file into memory all the
> > time, just to access a page file. Or use the hash of the page name as the
> > file name. Both choices do imply that you lose the nice file names of
> > course.
> 
> ...and if the mapping file gets lost or corrupted, you're toast.
> 
> ...and you can't just copy individual page files from one system to 
> another and have things still work.  
> 
> (Well, we *could* see about dynamically regenerating the mapping file
> if it's ever determined to be corrupt or incomplete, but this
> still seems problematic to me.  I think simplicity wins here.)

Just out of curiosity, what did you think of appending an additional token
that indicates the case?  I just realized a hyphen doesn't work since it's
allowed in a page name, but a dot would. We'd then get these examples:

  Page			Case-bits 	(hex)	File name
  main.abc		0000, 000 	0x00	main.abc.0
  main.ABC		0000, 111 	0x07	main.abc.7
  Main.Abc		1000, 100 	0x44	main.abc.44
  Long.PageName		1000, 10001000	0x0111	long.pagename.111
  LongGroup.LongerName	100010000, 1000001000  0x44208
						longgroup.longername.44208

It's kind of cute, but probably very confusing for someone looking at 
wiki.d/  ;-)

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr