man-pages-linux needs case sensitive directories

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Feb 15 00:11, Brian Inglis via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Linux man pages 6.03 has been released.
> I realized that some of the man pages are case sensitive e.g. _[Ee]xit.2,
> {NAN,nan}.3, perhaps others.
> I took care of my own system using commands like below, but would appreciate
> advice on whether there is any better portable or Cygwin specific approach,
> and what are the opinions on the best way to handle this in the cygport for
> download and install?
> Is this supported by Cygwin on Windows 10 versions >= [20]18-03 with the
> directory attribute set, are there likely to be any problems with git, or in
> general with POSIX<->Windows file names?
> 
> $ cd /usr/share/man/linux/
> $ for s in man?; do fsutil file setCaseSensitiveInfo $s; done

You can do this in Cygwin with the chattr(1) tool, see chattr --help.
The hint "WSL must be installed" appears to be outdated, at least on
Windows 11.  There are two approaches for case-sensitivity, see

  https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-casesensitive

  https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-casesensitivedirs

However, as part of the distro, the package must not rely on
case-sensitivity.  We have to assume that most users are using Windows
in default settings.  And we still support Windows versions prior to
Windows 10 1803.  But even then, I encountered serious trouble with
case-sensitive directories on remote shares, see

  https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3885

so you'd get into trouble if the Cygwin installation is on a share.

For colliding man pages, what you can do is to append a character to
the man page file, so you can install both.  For instance:

  exit.2
  Exit.2a

  nan.3
  NAN.3a

Kind of like that.


Corinna