Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on July 14, 2020 12:40 pm wrote:
>
> Let's ask some simpler questions.

Here's a simple question for you: can you never really admit that Apple does something wrong?

They literally picked the worst possible thing you could do with filenames. Really. They corrupt fundamental user data. And you want to ask "simple questions" when nobody else has ever done anything as stupid as they did..

I knew you were likely going to do the apologia thing, but Christ... It would be nice if you once in a while could avoid disappointing people with your incessant and rabid one-sided fanboism.

> Are you against the concept of filename normalization generically?

I will state unequivocally that it's both unnecessary and horribly stupid to do at an OS level, yes.

And if you have to do it (hint: you don't. Really. Not even if you want to be case-insensitive), for the love of all that is holy, don't pick the absolute worst possible kind of normalization like Apple did.

Others have done it better. Literally everybody else did. Decades before Apple screwed it up.

> So you don't just want no normalization
> of capitalization, you want name+' to be treated a
> separate filename from namé ?

You are apparently too ignorant and stupid to even understand the difference between comparing something as equal and considering them she same name, and forcing a particular normalization (and a particularly stupid one) on people.

Here's a hint: an OS can choose to say that it considerers the file names "And" and "and" to be the same.

That's case-insensitive and it's a big pain, but there are (bad) historical reasons to do so. Capitalization matters.

But notice how case-insensitive comparisons are not "normalization". You can still call your file "And", and the system preserves the case.

Internally, to do the case-insensitive compare, there may be hidden normalization going on (ie the comparison may be done by comparing every character turned to upper-case), but that normalization isn't visible or forced on the user.

So the user can choose to have CamelCase file names. Sounds good? Sure, you can also then open it using "camelcase", and there are problems with that too (really), but this is at least considered generally fairly acceptable and understandable.

Notice: the above does not normalize the names. It preserves the case, it just doesn't consider it important for name comparisons. Two different things entirely.

Now, as the ignoramus you are, you go "but that's what Apple does!".

Would you admit that Apple did something wrong if it always turned all filenames into ALL UPPERCASE?

You'd find that really horrible, wouldn't you?

And that is exactly what Apple is doing, just at a different level. Apple is indeed case preserving, but not normalization-preserving. And they not only mess with normalization, they literally pick the worst possible one that nobody sane would pick.

And exactly like you don't need to turn all filenames into UPPER-CASE in order to compare them, you absolutely don't need to turn all utf-8 into NFD to compare them.

It really is kind of the ASCII equivalent to not just always picking the upper-case name (which is kind of reasonable and historic if you want to normalize case), but literally then pickibg some other internal format that everybody will have to convert back from when using it.

It's really not that different from saying "not only will we turn your "Abc" filename into "ABC", but we'll do it in EBCDIC because that's what we do internally", and making the argument that EBCDIC is very traditional and thus sensible.

But you fundamentally physically cannot understand that this would be a problem, can you? Because in your world Apple can never make a mistake. So you must come up with these "simple questions" to try to show how what Apple did was right and proper, don't you?

Linus