Should "yum install" be case sensitive?

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Mon Nov 26 20:40:02 UTC 2007


seth vidal wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 01:49 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> seth vidal wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 21:03 +0100, Ralf Ertzinger wrote:
>>>> Hi.
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:55:34 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote
>>>>
>>>>> Search is case insensitive, list is a search.  However packages are
>>>>> case sensitive.  While we don't /currently/ have a Miro and a miro,
>>>>> the rpm database would allow for it, thus install/removal actions
>>>>> need to be case sensitive.
>>>> How about "try case sensitive first, and insensitive if the first does
>>>> not turn up anything"?
>>> yes, b/c we love it so much when computer programs try to think for us.
>> They already do in a lot of occasions anyway. Is there a real reason not 
>> to do this? I always hated finding out that some package have 
>> capitalizations for no obvious reasons. MySQL or mysql or Mysql... Being 
>> able to just type yum install mysql without having to worry about the 
>> specifics would be nice.
> 
> yes, b/c it is a really bad idea.
> 
> much like having: rm -rf foo actually be case insensitive.

I understood you think it is a bad idea but if yum already checks first 
to see if there is a perfect match and then does a more fuzzy search, I 
don't see a problem with it. There are people who do yum -y remove foo 
and then blame yum. I think your rm -rf example is similar.

There is a real need to solve the problem that OP talks about. It has 
bitten me more than once including precisely the example cited: Miro. I 
am not sure what would be the best solution though. Debian does it by 
enforcing lower case on all their packages IIRC.

Rahul




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