[Libguestfs] [PATCH 1/3] New API: case-sensitive-path to return case sensitive path on NTFS 3g fs

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 01:54:23PM +0000, Matthew Booth wrote:
> The alternative here, is to do 2 things:
>
> 1. Change the implementation of every existing API call which takes a  
> Guest path to call the new path resolution function first.
> 2. Fix up the path resolution function so this is safe to do.
>
> The first shouldn't be too hard because it's all auto-generated. The  
> second should[n't] be hard to do either, because it's a relatively small  
> change to your existing patch to make it check the filesystem type  
> first, before deciding whether to be case-sensitive or case-insensitive.
>
> The result is that reading a file out of a windows config file and then  
> accessing it will Just Work, as will accessing a file with a  
> well-defined path on Windows. The library user doesn't need to do  
> anything extra, and there is no addition to the API.

OK I now understand what you mean.  I think that such a large change
to the API is very risky, and I think a lot harder than you imagine
(not all the path parsing code is autogenerated, unfortunately[1], and
also it's not clear what filesystems are case-{in,}sensitive).

And in order to support something which is only used in one very
narrow case: getting a string from a Windows configuration file.

That's why it's better to confine this change to a single API function
that people who do that can use, and everyone else can ignore.

Rich.

[1] Look at recursive_mkdir for example, or mkdtemp, or the functions
that can take either a path or a device.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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