GSoC project ideas

[Scott Ritchie]

Kai Blin wrote:
> Feel free to add your own project ideas, maybe elaborate a bit on the 
> deliverables of the idea.
> 
Here's my idea that I'm hoping someone will take up:

Write a case insensitive FUSE filesystem for us to put the entire
~/.wine directory in.  See http://wiki.winehq.org/CaseInsensitiveFilenames

There are two main advantages to this:
Sometimes applications break because users need to install a patch by
hand into the filesystem (say, a zip file), and the files within have a
different case then the files they're supposed to overwrite.  This leads
to multiples of the same file, and Wine sometimes chooses the older one,
leading to weird breakages.

More importantly, a FUSE filesystem like this would allow us to finally
get some speedups by no longer having to prove case-insensitive files
don't exist.  This is a direct cause of some apps working very very
slowly, including install shield (see
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3817)


Interestingly, this doesn't strictly have to be a Wine SOC project.  It
could fairly easily stand on its own.  We'd probably be the only user
though, so I mention it here.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie