Case Insensitivity

By David E. Wheeler

I pushed out new versions of PGXN::Manager, PGXN::API, and PGXN::Site today, all with the aim of resolving some issues with case-sensitivity. I was alerted to this when Daniele Varrzzo released italian_fts with the Italian tag and the API sync blew up. Oops.

So here’s the deal. The following objects have case-insensitive names on PGXN:

  • Distributions
  • Extensions
  • Versions
  • Users (nickname)
  • Tags

These names are case-preserving, so they should show up with the proper capitalization in JSON files and whatnot. But to avoid issues with URLs, I decided that all file names should be lowercase only. Fortunately, nearly everything was lowercase already: only a few nickname JSON files were not lowercased, plus the files for pgTAP. So once I got the code updated, I renamed those files appropriately. In the case of the pgTAP download, I actually re-indexed it, so that the prefix in the zip file would properly be “pgtap-0.25.0” instead of “pgTAP-0.25.0”, since the file name is now pgtap-0.25.0.pgz.

So why make these objects case-insensitive? Well, because I tend to think of the names of things as having meaning, and really, there is no difference in meaning between “pgtap,” “pgTAP,” or “PGTap.” I’ve relased pgTAP; I think it would be as confusing as hell if someone else released a completely different distribution named “PGTap.” (And I went through a bit of hell when the Apache::test CPAN module was replaced with Apache::Test, a completely new module. It really messed things up on the case-insensitive file system I use).

But as I said, the case is preserved in the name I use, just not in the names of files. So if you look at the pgTAP distribution page, you’ll see that “This Release” is labeled “pgTAP 0.25.0” (I need to fix the <h1> element still).