Thoughts on case sensitivity now that APFS is here?

[kgreene]

I see that APFS now support case sensitivity. (Apparently it's off by default in mac os but on for iOS?)

What are people's thoughts on creating new pools that are case sensitive? I seem to remember maczfs was only case sensitive, at least at one point. It seems like with this supported in APFS as a possibility future versions of mac os might play nicer with case sensitivity?

Anyway, I was thinking of creating a new pool with case sensitivity on but I'd like to hear people's thoughts.

Also it looks like the same thing is happening with unicode normalization, apfs apparently doesn't do this anymore? In theory that means a pool using the default behavior may play nicely with (updated) applications? It may be risky to try now though...

[leeb]

I see that APFS now support case sensitivity.

So did (and does) HFS, going back for a very long time. The reasons it isn't used by default with macOS have nothing to do with the filesystem itself and thus APFS makes no change here. The real reasons are primarily legacy, maybe mixed in with some philosophical/practical concerns when it comes to "the average user". Legacy-wise, as the default has always been case-insensitive and Apple has never given any sort serious pressure any other way a lot of important software simply doesn't work when run off a case-sensitive fs at all. This includes key big ones like Adobe's, so I really don't expect this to change on the Mac anytime soon (at the least Apple would give a heads up of a year or two saying they were going to change the default, which I'm not aware they have yet unless I missed it completely?).

However, as this is a per-filesystem property in ZFS and it's easy and encouraged to use a lot of them, you should feel free to deploy it as you find useful. You might find it handy to have a dedicated case sensitive ones for doing development work for example, since normally one has to be very careful sharing a git repo between case sensitive/insensitive systems.

[kgreene]

I went back and realized that my current zfs pool is case sensitive since it is an upgrade maczfs one. Given that I haven't had problems really with it being case sensitive (maybe one or twice) I will probably stick with it being sensitive. Apparently APFS is default case sensitive in iOS now, but not in macOS. Apple appears to change things at the last minute with APFS so who knows how it will go in the long run. Apparently they originally said they were doing no normalization and applications had to do it themselves. This was changed fairly quickly when they realized this would be a disaster.

I'm still wondering then, given I have a maczfs pool originally, I'm assuming there was no normalization in that one so likely there is no normalization currently? I have my iTunes library on it and it appears to work OK, though people say it can cause trouble. Is that because I just haven't happened to have any track names that have normalization issues or something? I'm not sure why I'm fixating on this, but I guess if I don't have a pool doing normalization I'm paranoid about changing it now for a new one. Likely using it as suggested would probably be safer but since APFS appears to maybe be going in the right direction I have some hope.