[tex-live] behaviour of kpsewhich on case-insensitive mac system

[Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda]

'ello,

I usually favour case sensitivity to be the norm, mostly because it 
makes things simpler (grain of salt here) by ensuring a deterministic 
result, i.e, the result maps 1:1 what we were looking for without 
potential traps and/or pitfalls.

That said, case insensitivity is also interesting towards sanitising 
results (more salt please), i.e, "john" still refers to "John" which 
might be a good thing. However, there's a huge room for interpretation 
here. Also, I am not sure how sorting would be in these situations. I 
like to favour lexicographic rules most of the time, but when we ignore 
case, we are losing a potential significant information.

In conclusion, nothing can be drawn for here (except the fact that I am 
trying to divert myself from writing a thesis). :) My suggestion is to 
keep things as they are, so we save energy and effort: entia non sunt 
multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. :)

Cheerio!

Paulo

Em 21-09-2017 09:46, Nelson H. F. Beebe escreveu:
> Manfred Lotz <manfred at dante.de> writes on Wed, 20 Sep 2017 20:48:37
> +0200 about checking for a case-preserving filesystem:
> 
>>> ...
>>> Is there time to check the case sensitivity of the filesystem by
>>> running
>>>
>>>     touch   some_weird_name
>>>     touch   SOME_WEIRD_name
>>> ...
> 
> Let us remember that such things are a property of the filesystem,
> rather than the O/S.  Thus, such a check cannot be done at configure
> time, but only at run time, and then only in the same filesystem where
> the question needs to be answered.  However, the touch command will
> fail if that filesystem is mounted read-only.
> 
> At our large site (18K+ users), for performance reasons, our
> thin-client servers get read-only nightly copies of much shared
> software in local directory trees.  On other systems, ZFS snapshots
> may be distributed to secondary and tertiary servers, and then
> NFS-mounted from there by client machines: they too, being snapshots,
> are read-only.
> 
> Thus, the problem of single-case vs case-insensitive vs
> case-insensitive + case-preserving vs case sensitive filesystem
> variants is not easy to deal with automatically by tools like tlmgr
> and TeX input commands.
> 
> When I find filename lettercase conflicts in user (La)TeX files, I
> point out to them the necessity of consistent filenaming conventions,
> the easiest to remember being to downcase everything, except for two
> files: Makefile and README.  I also point out that spaces, and
> punctuation other than a single dot, should be avoided in filenames,
> and that while modern systems handle Unicode characters above the
> ASCII limit of U+007F, older ones, and many software tools, do not.
> Then there is the issue of filename length issues as well, 8 + 3, 31,
> 63, 127, 255, ...  What a mess.
> 
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