Is it beneficial to development to use a case-sensitive file system?

Question

Is there any benefit to developing on a case sensitive file system?

I recently heard that Adobe products do not run on case sensitive file systems. Is developing on a case-sensitive file system the simplest way to avoid such problems?

Answer 1

Rather than developing on a system just because it has case sensitivity, which is quite a big constrain, you can more pragmatically:

• design so that it can behave correctly on case-sensitive FS
• run tests on it, after thinking of what tests will spot case-sensitivity problems

Answer 2

I'd always recommend to avoid requirements. Having a case-insensitive file system is such a requirement. Having a case-sensitive file system is another one (to allow files with same name but different casing).

Additionally, I'd always recommend to develop on a system that is as close to production as possible.

Answer 3

To answer the question: No, you'll run into equivalent problems when your product is deployed to case insensitive file systems like the default configuration of HFS+ which is the file system on any Mac OS X box.

The best strategy is to build it on whatever your dev machine is and test it on both case sensitive and insensitive systems. If you have a default Mac OS X installation, your file system is case insensitive. One way to get a case sensitive file system is to use disk utility to create a case sensitive read/write disk image.

Of course, you'll still not be testing against a completely case sensitive environment - ~/Library/Application Support would still be on a case insensitive system. You'd probably need to create a user whose home directory is a symlink to your case sensitive disk image. I don't know if that would work, I've never tried it.