Re: name casing

Text item:

Hi IBIS gurues,

As far as I remember, the only request we made originally was to disable case
sensitivity for DOS/Windows or PC compiled systems. Now that we have so many
operating systems on various machines which emulate other operating systems,
this request is not so clear to me any more. I am not even sure what the reason
for the all-lower case rule was for case sensitive operating systems such as
UNIX.

To make things simple (?) would it make sense to compile case insensitive for
those operating systems which are case insensitive, and case sensitive for those
which are case sensitive?

Arpad Muranyi
Intel Corporation
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
All,

   I think I understand the name casing problem, but don't gather from the
mail what the solution is supposed to be. Here's my take on it:

1) For DOS it makes sense to take the filename input by the user and
   convert it to lowercase before processing it. I assume other
   applications must do this because 'edit abc' does the same thing for
   me as 'edit ABC' (i.e., I get the same file both times).

2) Other O.S.'s (NT, UNIX) accessing DOS filesystems is not really a
   parser bug. The spec says that filenames must be all lower case, but
   this seems to conflict with the senario mentioned.

I can only think of 3 solutions, none of which seem complete:

 - We can change the parser as mentioned in #1, but that won't help
   #2.

 - We can put in a compile switch that will allow the product to always
   convert the input name to lowercase, but that will only help those
   who purchase the source and can compile it that way.

 - We can always convert the input name to lowercase and fully eliminate
   the opportunity of UNIX, NT, ... users from parsing files that have
   any uppercase characters in their names. This could be fine since
   the rules say they must be lowercase. However, if a UNIX user happens
   to have 2 files, one called 'abc.ibs' and the other 'ABC.ibs', and they
   enter 'ibischk2 ABC.ibs' they will end up parsing the other file and
   probably not know their mistake.

Please email Ron and I with your suggestions.

Paul Munsey

Text item: External Message Header

The following mail header is for administrative use
and may be ignored unless there are problems.

***IF THERE ARE PROBLEMS SAVE THESE HEADERS***.

Message-Id: <950303061654_73053.721_GHB63-2@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: name casing
Cc: Kellee Crisafulli <kellee@nwlink.com>,
        Will Hobbs <Will_Hobbs@ccm2.jf.intel.com>
To: Arpad Muranyi <Arpad_Muranyi@ccm.fm.intel.com>,
        Ron Neville <75123.3477@compuserve.com>, Bob Ross <bob@icx.com>
From: Paul Munsey <73053.721@compuserve.com>
Date: 03 Mar 95 01:16:55 EST
Received: by dub-img-2.compuserve.com (8.6.10/5.941228sam)
     id BAA14310; Fri, 3 Mar 1995 01:18:32 -0500
Received: from dub-img-2.compuserve.com by hermes.intel.com (5.65/10.0i); Fri, 3
 Mar 95 02:41:25 -0800
Received: from hermes.intel.com by fmmail.fm.intel.com with smtp
     (Smail3.1.28.1 #2) id m0rkUla-000algC; Fri, 3 Mar 95 02:39 PST
Received on Fri Mar 3 08:25:29 1995