I honestly don't even understand the joke. Case-insensitive file names cause problems, but what does that have to do with version control branch names?

[–] [email protected] 116 points 2 days ago (25 children)

Inside git's internal plumbing folder, git holds a file with the branch name and all of the references (files and changes) for that branch.

When you make a new branch git will update its internal plumbing checking to see if the new branch already exists, updates its references to the new branch if it doesn't (all held internally in a case sensitive way). It will then make that new branch file, git has already checked that the case senitive name for the branch doesn't exist internally, so it should be good to go.

Part of its process is creating that internal branch file... But wait!

Windows doesn't have case sensitive naming so when it tries to make that new branch file it will overwrite the old one (since it shouldn't exist by git's own reference!) All of the files and references for it now get nuked.

Now you're at best back to wherever that originally named branch came from, at worse your .git folder is properly borked.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 2 days ago (23 children)

I’m probably going to get downvoted to Hell and back, but someone’s gotta say it: that’s a git problem, not Windows.

First of all, I agree that case-insensitive file systems suck. It makes things inconsistent, especially from a development standpoint.

But, everyone has known that Windows (and macOS) use case insensitive file systems. At least for Windows, it always has been that way.

Git was written in Linux, which uses a case sensitive file system. So it’s no surprise that its internals use case insensitive storage. Someone ported it over to Windows, and I’m sure they knew about the file system differences. They could’ve taken that into account for file systems that are case insensitive, but chose not to do anything to safe guard Windows users.

But until the day that somebody fixes Git, everybody who is not using case sensitive file systems needs to care more about how they name things (and make sure their team does too). Because fuck everyone else, right?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The issue isn't just a simple oversight. Git includes the file name as part of the tree and commit hash. The hash has security implications. There's really no way to make the hash support case insensitivity without opening up a multitude of holes there. So there will always be a mismatch, and you can't just fix it without changing how git works from the ground up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Of course you can, make it lowercase internally and store the case formatted string for output.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That'd break git repos where files with the same name, but different case exist.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I was talking about branch names, not file names. File duplicates due to case sensitivity aren't a problem on Windows anyway because those are already enforced by the file system. Unless you have people working on Linux that have multiple files with a similar name but with different casing but those should know better.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Yes you can

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