[GSoC][RFC] Case Insensitive Filesystem

[Scott Ritchie]

Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Marc Andre Tanner <mat at brain-dump.org> writes:
> 
>> Yes that's true the case information is lost but is it really needed? 
>> If you create the files with the original mixed case you will have to
>> scan the whole directory in order to match it to a given filename. 
>> And if i am not mistaken this is exactly what wine does. 
> 
> Yes, and that's precisely because Wine wants to preserve case, so that
> tools that look at the filesystem directly see the right thing. If you
> are going to store everything lowercase in the filesystem, then we could
> just as well do that inside Wine, without a FUSE module.
> 

It seems like we have a few goals:

* Prevent having to read the whole directory when looking for a
case-insensitive file
* Allow non-Wine programs to work with the cased filenames
* Prevent the creation of conflicting files

The last one is important, as we need to have a 1:1 correspondence
between cased and uncased files in the .wine folder to prevent breakages
when someone, say, installs a patch with different casing from a zip file.

I don't see any reason why it would be bad to have the FUSE module
mounted at login rather than when Wine starts.  This would make your
Wine folder no different to other apps than, say, a vfat disk mounted
there.  I should be able to extract a zip with file-roller containing
"foo.txt" and have it overwrite "Foo.txt" even if Wine isn't running.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie