Tips for git capitalization practices on Windows?

Question

I am administering a repository for data analysis stored on the network filesystem, with three of running MsysGit in windows (1.8.4, W7). ignorecase is set to true in the repository.

Does anyone have any best practices for keeping the repository sane w/r/t the insane Windows capitalization settings?

Specifically (sort of), I have a directory that was (probably) changed from Utils, to utils, or vice versa. Now I am seeing all sorts of weird behavior. For instance, if I run

cd Utils
git log ../utils/foo.txt

I see two entries for the file (the original commit and an addition), but if I run

git log foo.txt

I only see one log entry.

I don't have any idea what is going on, and I know we will run into similar issues later, so if anyone has some wisdom to share I would very much appreciate it.

Answer 1

You can find one advise in "Git-windows case sensitive file names not handled properly", which reminds us of the current situation (even though you might be dealing with just Windows):

If you want to do development on multiple different platforms, you have to respect the restrictions of those platforms and you have to confine yourself to the lowest common denominator of all the platforms you support.

• Windows supports ADS (Alternate Data Stream), Linux doesn't.
• OSX supports resource forks, Windows doesn't.
• BSD supports case-sensitivity, Windows doesn't.

So, on a FAT32/NTS case-preserving system:

Does anyone have any best practices for keeping the repository sane w/r/t the insane Windows capitalization settings?

Mainly:

• chose a convention for using lower/uper cases, and stick with it,
• Put a hook to detect and reject conflicting case conflicts,
• set temporarily ignorecase to false if you need to change the case