From: Johan Nilsson <johan.nilsson@...>
Date: 2005-01-24T17:41:06+09:00
Subject: Re: File naming conventions


"BG - Ben Armstrong" <BArmstrong@dymaxion.ca> wrote in message 
news:1106157923.16968.112.camel@bgpc.dymaxion.ca...
> On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 02:46 +0900, Robert Klemme wrote:
>> File system portability: there are file systems out there that think
>> "foo.rb" is the same as "Foo.rb".

[Sorry for not writing this in a direct reponse to Robert, but my news 
server have already purged it]

Of course, I use one every day (case-preserving but not case-sensitive). 
When browsing the file system, I would still definitely prefer 
CamelCasedFileNamingExample.rb over camelcasedfilenamingexample.rb - IMHO 
itsallaboutreadability ;-)

>
> Thanks so much for pointing that out.  As OpenVMS Ruby users (using the
> ODS-2 filesystem,) we had to hack rubicon in the following fashion to
> work around a file casing problem that breaks on our platform:

Actually I've been doing C++ under OpenVMS for some months during the last 
year, and after some time trying to use third-party libraries I gave up and 
switched to ODS-5 (might not be an option for everyone, of course). Not to 
mention the problems ODS-2 caused for source control with a FreeBSD server.

I'm a bit curious about your experience with Ruby on OpenVMS. I've only 
downloaded, installed and tested the installation myself and it seemed to 
work (even though I had installation problems due to 
decompressing/installing from an ODS-5 disc). There seems to be quite some 
code manipulating paths by directly using e.g. "../.." - have you 
experienced any related problems?

[code snipped]

>
> Thus, it is a bad idea from a portability perspective to write code such
> that the case of the filename conveys meaning.

I definitely don't mean to imply there should be a semantic difference 
between 'myclass.rb' and 'MyClass.rb'. The main reason would be consistency 
(and that it's so much easier to read).

But, that's only my own 0.02EUR.

// Johan