Should "yum install" be case sensitive?

[Andrew Farris]

Michał Bentkowski wrote:
> Hi!
> Recently, a funny thing happened on Polish Fedora forum. Some users
> were talking about Miro but rest of them weren't able even to install
> that... After some time it turned out that they tried to type "yum
> install miro" instead of "yum install Miro".
> So my question is the same as in the topic: should "yum install" be
> case sensitive?
> I haven't checked but I'm quite sure (correct me if I'm wrong) that
> there are no packages in repo whose names differ in letter size.
> What's more: "yum list" command is case insensitive and there's
> nothing wrong with it, is there? I know that you can say that these
> users I wrote about in the beginning should have used "yum list" first
> and then they would have found out why things went wrong but it makes
> a need to type more and more commands.
> "yum install" gives a summary what packages are going to be installed
> so if a user wanted to run "Foo", but not "foo" she/he could break the
> installation.
> Besides, pressing SHIFT key could be painful ;-)
> So my proposal is to make "yum install" (and probably "yum update" as
> well) case insensitive.
> Just think about it :)
> 
> Regards.

I would suggest that if this is done it would be extremely important to force
all package names to lower case.  Typing 'yum install foo' with a case
insensitive yum and getting both Foo and foo would be a broken situation.  Lets
assume they each bring in different dependencies... how do you choose one and
not the other?  With multiple repositories you cannot assume this won't happen.

I have wished package maintainers would just go with lower case for a long
time... directory listings of packages end up with essentially two separate
alphabetical listings (all upper case names first).  The mixture of case in perl
package names is especially annoying.

(but watch out for the panic as we go suggesting something so redmondish as not
respecting a file's case!)

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> <ajfarris at gmail.com>
   gpg 0xC99B1DF3 at pgp.mit.edu

No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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