Re: Case sensitive/insensitive changes needed

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "John E. Malmberg" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 19:16:13 -0600
> 
> Currently on GNU Make is either built to be case sensitive or 
> insensitive as a build time parameter.
> 
> On Windows and Unix, including OS-X, I think that the case sensitivity 
> is a property of the file system, so it is possible to have both case 
> sensitive and case insensitive file systems mounted.

That would need significant refactoring of the Make code, since it
doesn't just stat a file it wants to find, but instead records the
entire directory in memory and hashes the file names.  So you need
case-insensitive hashes.

> The properties of ODS-5 case handling is similar to what MSDOS/Windows 
> case handling should be, so it is surprising to me that some of the code 
> is VMS specific where it should be common to both.

I guess the surprise will disappear if I say that both the DOS and
Windows ports of Make are traditionally case-sensitive, even though
the file system isn't.  The case-insensitive feature is something
someone contributed, is turned off by default, and I personally never
used it, so I don't know if it works well.

> * hash.h: Will need to do something with these macros.  Not sure what
>    yet.

Yes, exactly.  Doing TRT with these might open a path to a better
case-insensitive file support on other systems.