From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-10-30T12:52:59+09:00
Subject: Re: jruby and case insensitive environment variables on win32

Martin DeMello wrote:
> When converting a Win32/Ruby application to JRuby, I ran into an
> interesting quirk - the Windows Ruby interpreter (1.8.6 from the
> one-click installer) let me "get away" with whatever mix of upper and
> lower case I liked when accessing environment variables (e.g.
> ENV['UserProfile'], ENV['userprofile'], ENV["USERPROFILE"], etc),
> which is consistent with the way Windows itself does it. JRuby seems
> to follow the Unix model where UserProfile and USERPROFILE are two
> separate variables.
> 
> I raise this here rather than filing a bug with the JRuby team because
> I am unsure as to what the correct behaviour is - are JRuby
> environment variables a property of the JVM, and only incidentally a
> property of the underlying operating system that the JVM picked them
> up from, or should they accurately return the same results that MRI
> would have?

In JRuby, we pull in whatever the system provides as an environment, and 
we don't do any magic to support case insensitivity. I'd like to know if 
1.8.6 is doing something "extra" to support this or if it's just the way 
environment variables work on win32.

FYI, it has already been reported as a bug, so don't worry about that.

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-1441

Of course, if you'd like to try fixing it, we'd appreciate that too :)

- Charlie