Linus Torvalds hates case-insensitive file-systems

This story about Linus Torvalds expressing his hatred for case-insensitive file-systems gives me PTSD of a gnarly experience at a startup I founded back in 2006.

Our standard dev machine was a Mac that shipped with a case-insensitive FS, and our product was custom hardware that ran an OS based on OpenWRT, which in turn was based on Linux. We cross-compiled the code from our native Mac to our custom hardware. While setting things up, I ran into a build error that was super hard to track down. Deep in the bowls of the Linux kernel, in the IP Tables module, there were two files that differed only by case. On our Macs, this resulted in a directory with a missing file, causing link errors.

An extra bit of irony of this story is that the startup where most our team came from (WatchGuard Technologies) used to pay the maintainer of the Linux firewall that ultimately made the decision to have two files that differ only by case.

The moral of the story: Linus is right!