From: Marko Schulz <in6x059@...>
Date: 2002-05-07T12:22:35+09:00
Subject: Re: require and case

On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 05:14:27AM +0900, Dave Thomas wrote:
> 
> I'm becoming convinced by this thread 

It had the contrary effect on me. :-) 

> that rb_require should normalize all paths before executing, and
> should store those normalized paths in $".

That will likely break scripts that fiddle around with $:. So it
probably is unwise to change it in a minor release.

> Thus on a Windows box the names should be converted to lower case
> and expand_path called. 

Does expand_path() solve the problem that on pre-NTFS-filesystems
every file with a name that is too long has two different names?
  parsedate.rb vs. parsda~1.rb

Please note that that the path might also contain "mangled" directory
names.

> On a Unix both, the case should be left unchanged but expand_path is
> called.

expand_path() doesn't resolve symbolic links. 

If there is more than one hard link to a file it is impossible to
determine _the_ correct name. I don't know NTFS, but this might be an
issue there too.


Contrary to Dave the thread didn't convince me at all.  Most people
have absolutely no problem that require might load a file twice if
they specify the name in two different ways.  It if easy enough to be
careful.

And there are so many special cases how a file may be addressed that
it is virtually impossible for ruby to ensure that a file gets loaded
only once.  So IMHO it should stick with the simple and understandable
route it takes at the moment.

-- 
marko schulz