[darcs-users] Huge mess moving to mac

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Max Battcher writes:

 > Personally, I've yet to see good usage of case-dependent filenames.

If the names are linguistically meaningful in that form, no.  But case
is not the only use of distinguishing 0x41 from 0x61.  Two that I
personally have occasional use for are UTF-7 and "escape-less JIS"
(normally Japanese is encoded with the high bit set on all bytes so it
can be mixed with ASCII, but if you *know* that a particular string is
Japanese, then you can force the high bit at display time).  IIRC
tinyurl.com also uses case-sensitive paths.

Again, David (like Linus) chose hexadecimal encoding for representing
the hash in patch filenames, but a base 64 encoding would be equally
plausible IMHO---except for the pain it would cause on case-
insensitive file systems.