code_fu

Ever since I joined the Apple seed developer program earlier in the year, I've been going through a constant cycle of reinstalls trying out new developer seeds of Mac OS X Tiger. At one point, being an inquisitive - and some say masochistic - fellow, I decided to try out a HFS+ Case-Sensitive file system instead of plain HFS+. Case sensitivity is useful when interacting with different UNIX operating systems or when compiling and using some UNIX applications ported to the Mac.

What this mumbo-jumbo means is that on a case sensitive file system two documents: Document.txt and DOCUMENT.TXT are treated as unique files and can exist in the same folder. Plain HFS+ - while not case sensitive - is case preserving. This means if you name a file DoCuMeNt.TXT the case is remembered by the filesystem but you can't create another file called Document.txt in the same folder.

After a couple of weeks happily using my powerbook as a development environment, I encountered several problems when installing third-party applications. The first was a groupware client called FirstClass that I use to read posts in the Tokyo Ringo Mac User's Group. FirstClass tries to open a directory: /Library/FirstClass/fcp instead of /Library/FirstClass/FCP. After creating a symbolic link (like a shortcut for you windows folks) from fcp to FCP, all was fine. Then I tried installing Civilization III and Neverwinter Nights. Civ III did not even start. Neverwinter Nights went through the splash screen and died soon after. Since they were games, I didn't mind too much. Well okay, just a little bit.

I tried Macromedia Dreamweaver which seemed to work for a while; but when doing anything serious it would pop up with all these error messages saying it can't find several script files. Since I use it a lot I was not a happy camper. Adobe CS 2 is also reported not to work or even install (although there is a workaround). Imagine the chaos that would occur when applying patches that get the case for file names wrong. You might have multiple versions of the same file being loaded at the same time! I guess this is the reason why case sensitivity is supported for Macs OS X 10.4 Server and not for Client :)

So if you are planning to use a case sensitive filesystem, be prepared for a lot of sym linking drudgery. Personally, I settled with plain HFS+ for my system partition where I keep my Mac Applications and created a separate case sensitive partition for running and compiling UNIX applications.