Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:21:51 +0200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 30/04/2025 11:52, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 30.04.2025 11:06, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:
>> On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:45:20 +0200
>> David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:
>>> More relevant to this group, it make also be convenient for people
>>> trying to work with big C code bases that were written on Windows and
>>> you now want to compile (for whatever target you want) them on Linux.
>>> I've seen code bases developed on Windows machines where the
>>> capitalisation of include directives was inconsistent - that works on
>>> case-insensitive filesystems, but not on case-sensitive systems.  (Yes,
>>> I know there are many other ways to deal with such issues, but putting
>>> the source code in a case-insensitive directory on ext4 is one option.)
>>
>> I've seen on more than one occasion C++ (not C yet) projects where there
>> were 2 files only different in case, eg: Network.cpp and network.cpp where
>> the former would be the class and the latter would be procedural support code.
>> Good luck unzipping that on Windows or any other case insensitive file system.
> 
> For low-level system software like network functionality that
> would probably anyway not work on Windows in the first place
> without change, independent of the capitalization. (But the
> "case insensitive file system" issues, like the above mentioned
> case inconsistencies, are of course an inherent problem.)
> 
> And there's of course a related problem if we port software with
> longer maximum filename lengths to systems with shorter filename
> lengths.
> 

What systems are there now with filename length limits that would ever 
be relevant to hand-typed names?  Filename length limits can 
occasionally be relevant in some contexts (I've seen it in web spiders 
that try to turn complete URL's into a single filenames), but unless you 
are trying to compile code on DOS, any system will support any length of 
filename that someone would bother typing into an "#include" line.