[GSoC][RFC] Case Insensitive Filesystem

[Scott Ritchie]

Austin English wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Cesar Izurieta <cesar at ecuarock.net> wrote:
>>  > Alexandre Julliard wrote:
>>  >  > 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.
>>
>>  We could do this for the drive_c directory but what about /? you
>>  cannot enforce that there. Maybe this part project should be divided
>>  into two different problems. 1. How to achieve that for drive_c, and
>>  2. how to mount a proxy filesystem for / and apply some rules when
>>  conflicting files exist, as keep the newest conflicting file with the
>>  original name and rename other files like it was proposed on another
>>  thread on this list.
> 
> We could do this in wine itself for drive_c, which is where most of
> the problem seems to lie (assuming no one links their program files to
> a different mount point). Most performance issues/problem are with
> patches or with installers searching for lots of files (within
> drive_c). While it would be ideal to do this for the entire FS, doing
> it  for drive_c should resolve most issues.
> 

You're very right that doing this for just drive_c solves most issues
(as we can always fall back on Wine's existing behavior if we're outside
of C), however unless we have some Wine process always running there's
no way we can guarantee preserving the case integrity of drive_c just
inside Wine.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie