Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On Thu, 8 May 2025 01:57:05 -0500, BGB wrote:

Either way, case-insensitivity at the FS level adds complexity.

If you look around some other groups, you will see discussion of a recent
rant from Linus Torvalds on this very issue. Basically, he doesn’t like
case-insensitivity. And he is justified in pointing out that it leads to
more opportunities for bugs in the kernel code. The only reason we need to
have it is because it makes certain things easier for users.

I guess, one intermediate option could be to keep the FS proper as case
sensitive, but then fake case insensitivity at the level of the OS APIs
(based on a system-level locale setting).

There is a standard Unicode locale-independent case-folding algorithm.
That is what Linux implements. At the time of volume initialization, it
only involves setting one filesystem parameter, which says to assume that
all filenames are UTF-8-encoded.