Any arguments for keeping Yum case-sensitive?

[Dotan Cohen]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 15:53, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
>> Not true. Computers treat the two cases as separate characters because
>> there is no mechanism of having different versions of the same
>> character. However, humans treat the two cases as two forms of the
>> same character.
>
> For a small subset of Western European languages and subject to all sorts
> of caveats. Perhaps we should ask the same of say accented v unaccented
> letters (where the policy of being the same is very language dependant)
> or about languages of the rest of the world (the ones actually used by
> far more people than English variants).
>

Do there exist Fedora packages with those characters in the package
names? How would users who don't have the proper keyboard layouts
installed install such packages if yum _didn't_ support converting ç
to c?

In other words, your argument is against the idea of
case-insensitivity in theory only (as no packages with such names
exist), and actually supports my position in practice (as there would
be no other way to install such packages).


>> The question then reduces to: should the yum interface be designed to
>> be comfortable for a computer to interface with, or should the yum
>> interface be comfortable for a human to interface with.
>
> That question has no bearing on case sensitivity of yum if you bother to
> think about it a bit more. A "did you mean" matching interface is quite
> different to internal case sensitivity.
>

I agree that a "did you mean" option would be nice, as would a
case-insensitivity flag. It does not have to be the default behaviour.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com