>> NTFS stores a 128-kB case table in the filesystem.
>> It is used to make the B-tree directories work right.
>
> It's not B-trees, it is case folding.
The B-trees would be useless without case folding, because NT would
have to do a linear search for lookups done in the Win32 API.
> Just goes to show just
> how bad an idea case folding is.
>
> Case insensitivity is specifically prohibited by Posix.
NTFS is a POSIX filesystem and does support case-sensitive files.
Filenames that differ only by case must be next to each other so
that the Windows API (not case-sensitive) can find files.
Without that ordering, NT would have to scan the directory like
it does for FAT. Think of WINE and ext2: the whole directory must
be scanned because we don't sort files in the right way.
Case insensitivity is good from the viewpoint of lazy software
developers. Normal users often complain about Linux being
case-sensitive. In fact, they see it as an annoying bug.
IMHO it ought to be controlled by a directory attribute.
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