Formatting server volumes

[Whitehill]

I bought a Power Mac G5 Quad direct from Apple, with MacOS X Server. About nine (!) months later I noticed that the disk with the OS had been formatted with "case preserving but not case sensitive".

Is this expected? Would it be better as "Case-sensitive HFS+"?

[Giaguara]

It's expected.
It's usually less problematic to keep it case-insensitive as it is.

[Whitehill]

Originally Posted by Giaguara

It's usually less problematic to keep it case-insensitive as it is.

The reason I ask ... On the job about a year ago, I was given remote access to a SVN repository. Trying to check out everything, it died on a directory with two files

ABC
abc

After much hair pulling, I discovered the culprit was the disk format! I switched to another disk with case-sensitive formatting and moved on. But, from time to time, I have tried to build simple GNU packages and received weird failures which I have not had time to investigate in full detail. And I continue to suspect the disk format is the ultimate culprit.

[fryke]

There are problems with some GNU projects that rely on case-sensitivity. When Apple introduced the new format, they didn't push it, but using it (I did, because I thought it just sounded "better", although I didn't intend to start naming my files the same but in different case) revealed problems with a couple of applications. Adobe CS 2 applications didn't want to start (they died on launch), neither did Fetch at the time and a couple more.
I'd say most projects, by now, know about Mac OS X' ability to run on a case-sensitive OS.

If anything, after going case-sensitive, doesn't want to launch, you can do the following, a workaround I found out back then for Adobe's apps: Create a case-insensitive disk image (auto-growing) and put the apps that don't want to launch in there. Just keep that mounted at all time. The apps will launch.