[pmwiki-users] page naming oddity or bug

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Feb 10 09:45:19 CST 2005


On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 10:08:31AM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> When I do a search for "main/" I get two hits (WikiSandBox and WikiSandbox) 
> that take me to the same page. On those (that??) page(s), the titles match 
> the case of the link, but the content is identical. I can edit either one.
> 
> As an experiment, I created a page called Testpage which I then accessed 
> with the name TestPage. After editing TestPage, I discovered that Testpage 
> no longer existed. It had been replaced by TestPage. Looking in wiki.d/, I 
> could only find Main.TestPage.
> 
> Is this the way it is supposed to work??

Well, "supposed to work" implies intention, whereas I've generally ignored
issues dealing with case-insensitive filenames and said "however it works,
that's the way it works" (which is what we're seeing here).

In general, PmWiki assumes that page names are case sensitive -- i.e.,
"WikiSandBox" and "WikiSandbox" are two separate pages.  Thus, when 
performing the search, PmWiki found references to both and felt it 
important to list both.  

The fact that WikiSandBox and WikiSandbox end up being the same page
is because the operating system (Windows) uses case-insensitive filenames
and treats them as being the same.  On Linux, they would in fact be
separate pages.

All of the "fixes" I've come up with seem not worth the effort.
The options I've been able to come up with:
  1. Try to get PmWiki to treat all page names as case-insensitive.
     This means adding lots of extra stuff to get case-sensitive OS's
     to act as though they had case-insensitive filenames, *or*
  2. Replace PmWiki's file-based storage system with a database
     backend, where case-sensitivity isn't really an issue.

In the last item ("Testpage" versus "TestPage"), they're both the same
page, and Windows doesn't care if the 'P' is capitalized or not.  The
file will always be created with whatever case was used by the last
edit.

Pm



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