As far as I know, Mac can be either case sensitive or case insensitive (just need to choose how you format your disk)*. So we could do the same on XWiki and propose to choose between case sensitive and case insensitive at the installation (a variable in xwiki.properties)? I'm not against a case insentivity by default if I can switch it later. * I have a Mac at home and mine is case sensitive but I configured it 2 years ago. I don't know if, in the last 2 years, Apple decided to remove this choice between case sentivity and case insensitivity. On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 12:03:14PM +0100, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:

Hi Edy,

thanks for your message. From a forward-looking standpoint, I 100% agree with you that switching XWiki to case-insensitive would be a good thing to do. I've seen others (as well as myself) be lost because they were going to .../xwiki/bin/view/Main/Xyy instead of .../xwiki/bin/view/Main/XYY and vice-versa. If we were to make the decision today, I can't see a good reason why not to go case-insensitive, especially when targeting business users.

However we're not starting from a blank slate. There might be (I don't know that there is, but there might be) legitimate use cases for a page named "Xyy" vs a page named "XYY", both in the same wiki. I'd like to have a better idea of the consequences of this change, as well an analysis of a public site such as xwiki.org to see whether this could be causing unforeseen and other unexpected issues. In other words: what could go wrong?

Thanks,

Guillaume ᐧ

On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small letters or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different resources.

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe to assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users

-- Jean Simard [email protected] Research engineer at XWiki SAS http://www.xwiki.com Committer on the XWiki.org project http://www.xwiki.org

Hi Guillaume, Here's a quick snippet for detecting such cases in your current wiki: http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Case+insensitive+docume... Use it to detect collisions/mistakes and to have a better understanding of the problem. It is also useful to better understand the impact, if any, on your wiki if we were to move to case insensitive only (i.e. see how many pages would present problems and would have to be fixed, either manually or automatically). Thanks, Eduard On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Guillaume Lerouge <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi Edy,

thanks for your message. From a forward-looking standpoint, I 100% agree with you that switching XWiki to case-insensitive would be a good thing to do. I've seen others (as well as myself) be lost because they were going to .../xwiki/bin/view/Main/Xyy instead of .../xwiki/bin/view/Main/XYY and vice-versa. If we were to make the decision today, I can't see a good reason why not to go case-insensitive, especially when targeting business users.

However we're not starting from a blank slate. There might be (I don't know that there is, but there might be) legitimate use cases for a page named "Xyy" vs a page named "XYY", both in the same wiki. I'd like to have a better idea of the consequences of this change, as well an analysis of a public site such as xwiki.org to see whether this could be causing unforeseen and other unexpected issues. In other words: what could go wrong?

Thanks,

Guillaume ᐧ

On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small letters or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different resources.

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe to assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users

Hi Marius, On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> wrote:

I'm undecided. As a technical Linux user I prefer case sensitivity, but I can see why this is sometimes unexpected for non-technical users. I'm not sure how you plan to implement this. I know this thread is not about the technical aspects but still I think it's important to consider the cost that this change will imply.

First, even for a case insensitive system, I think it's very important to preserve the case entered by the user. For instance, If I create a user with the alias 'myCoolAlias' then I wouldn't like to see 'mycoolalias' displayed in the UI. Same, if I attach a file named 'myCoolPresentation.odp' then I want to see precisely that name on the list of attachments. So we need to store case sensitive values in the database.

The difference from now will be:

* when creating an entity: check that there's no other entity that has the same normalized reference (toLowerCase/toUpperCase)

* when retrieving an entity: look for normalized references

This means we'll have to call toLowerCase/toUpperCase very often so we need proper database indexes. Otherwise we'll have a performance impact.

Right. I posted a similar comment on the Jira issue. Another interesting idea I was just thinking about would be to add uniqueness constraints in the database on lower(doc.fullName) for instance. That would cover the creation step. Regarding performance, I have found in some quick searches that uniqueness constraints are also achievable through unique function-based indexes [1]. On both cases, we would have to investigate on the database support or solutions for using a function like lower() for the database unique constraint or the unique index. ---------- [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3944840/create-unqiue-case-insensitive-co...

Second, we have lots of places that query the database and since we have to store the raw case-sensitive values then we need to update all this places. Moreover, since it's not about a single field/column I'm not sure we can write a query filter to lower the case automatically. Then we also have a lot of extensions that query the database and that create entities. Those will have to be updated too.

Not sure a filter would be the solution, since queries should be application-specific.

Lastly, AFAIK lower case and upper case are locale dependent. The 'lower' query function doesn't have a locale parameter so it depends on the locale the database has been configured with. So there can be cases when a user won't be able to retrieve an entity using some locale dependent lowercase version of the reference because the database computes the lower case differently than what the user expects (because it uses a different locale).

Well, as long as we do something like lower(myValue) = lower(dbValue) instead of myValue = lower(dbValue), we should be good, right? (i. e. apply the same databse collation/logic on both the searched value and the db value so that we never get a missmatch). Thanks, Eduard

Thanks,

Marius

On Nov 7, 2014 12:34 PM, "Eduard Moraru" <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small letters or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different

resources.

...

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe

to

...

assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:03 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi Marius,

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea < [email protected]> wrote:

...

I'm undecided. As a technical Linux user I prefer case sensitivity, but I can see why this is sometimes unexpected for non-technical users. I'm not sure how you plan to implement this. I know this thread is not about the technical aspects but still I think it's important to consider the cost that this change will imply.

First, even for a case insensitive system, I think it's very important to preserve the case entered by the user. For instance, If I create a user with the alias 'myCoolAlias' then I wouldn't like to see 'mycoolalias' displayed in the UI. Same, if I attach a file named 'myCoolPresentation.odp' then I want to see precisely that name on the list of attachments. So we need to store case sensitive values in the database.

The difference from now will be:

...

* when creating an entity: check that there's no other entity that has the same normalized reference (toLowerCase/toUpperCase)

* when retrieving an entity: look for normalized references

This means we'll have to call toLowerCase/toUpperCase very often so we need proper database indexes. Otherwise we'll have a performance impact.

Right. I posted a similar comment on the Jira issue.

Another interesting idea I was just thinking about would be to add uniqueness constraints in the database on lower(doc.fullName) for instance. That would cover the creation step.

Regarding performance, I have found in some quick searches that uniqueness constraints are also achievable through unique function-based indexes [1].

On both cases, we would have to investigate on the database support or solutions for using a function like lower() for the database unique constraint or the unique index.

---------- [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3944840/create-unqiue-case-insensitive-co...

...

Second, we have lots of places that query the database and since we have to store the raw case-sensitive values then we need to update all this places. Moreover, since it's not about a single field/column I'm not sure we can write a query filter to lower the case automatically. Then we also have a lot of extensions that query the database and that create entities. Those will have to be updated too.

Not sure a filter would be the solution, since queries should be application-specific.

...

Lastly, AFAIK lower case and upper case are locale dependent. The 'lower' query function doesn't have a locale parameter so it depends on the locale the database has been configured with. So there can be cases when a user won't be able to retrieve an entity using some locale dependent lowercase version of the reference because the database computes the lower case differently than what the user expects (because it uses a different locale).

Well, as long as we do something like lower(myValue) = lower(dbValue) instead of myValue = lower(dbValue), we should be good, right? (i. e. apply the same databse collation/logic on both the searched value and the db value so that we never get a missmatch).

Not really, the problem you will have is that lower is not going to do it's job because you are not in the right locale. That means that you might end up with the request thinking that two values are not equals while if lower did its job properly it would have been. In XWiki side we will apply the locale to String.toLower and we will get a different result which means that you have cases where in the require two document name are not equals but they are when you compare two DocumentReference which might create many issues.

s/require/request/

...

Thanks, Eduard

...

Thanks,

Marius

On Nov 7, 2014 12:34 PM, "Eduard Moraru" <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small letters or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different

resources.

...

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe

to

...

assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne

-- Thomas Mortagne

Of course, the other thing to do would be going the direction of helpful suggestions: 1) When creating a resource (pages, spaces, wikis) we can propose resources that already exist similar to the entered name. This solves both casing and spelling issues. The point is to avoid creation of similar resources when reusing would have been the best way to go. 2) When landing on a non-existing resource, we can suggest similar resources instead of just showing the standard "resource not found" message. This covers URL mistyping and outdated links. Side Note: Perhaps we could do some sort of similar improvement to wiki links that, when a document does not exist, directly point to edit the new page. Instead, they could point to the wiki creation step with prefilled form values and suggestions. Other ideas might exist here. General example: User enters "test" and the UI suggests both "Test" (casing) and "testing" (possible mistyping) existing resources. This would probably be the simplest to implement without significant performance problems. However, this would be just UI candy and the platform would be left the way it is, a free-for-all. Thanks, Eduard On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:

Pretty much the same comments here.

On personal side this is one of the thing I hate about Windows ("just do what the hell I told you to do and don't try to be clever").

On technical side everyone should understand that this is a huge refactoring that will produce regressions for at least one year. Another things is that it's slower so performance are going to be worst in most of the XWiki code.

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:

...

I'm undecided. As a technical Linux user I prefer case sensitivity, but I can see why this is sometimes unexpected for non-technical users. I'm not sure how you plan to implement this. I know this thread is not about the technical aspects but still I think it's important to consider the cost that this change will imply.

First, even for a case insensitive system, I think it's very important to preserve the case entered by the user. For instance, If I create a user with the alias 'myCoolAlias' then I wouldn't like to see 'mycoolalias' displayed in the UI. Same, if I attach a file named 'myCoolPresentation.odp' then I want to see precisely that name on the list of attachments. So we need to store case sensitive values in the database. The difference from now will be:

* when creating an entity: check that there's no other entity that has the same normalized reference (toLowerCase/toUpperCase)

* when retrieving an entity: look for normalized references

This means we'll have to call toLowerCase/toUpperCase very often so we need proper database indexes. Otherwise we'll have a performance impact.

Second, we have lots of places that query the database and since we have to store the raw case-sensitive values then we need to update all this places. Moreover, since it's not about a single field/column I'm not sure we can write a query filter to lower the case automatically. Then we also have a lot of extensions that query the database and that create entities. Those will have to be updated too.

Lastly, AFAIK lower case and upper case are locale dependent. The 'lower' query function doesn't have a locale parameter so it depends on the locale the database has been configured with. So there can be cases when a user won't be able to retrieve an entity using some locale dependent lowercase version of the reference because the database computes the lower case differently than what the user expects (because it uses a different locale).

Thanks,

Marius

On Nov 7, 2014 12:34 PM, "Eduard Moraru" <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small

letters

...

or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different resources.

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe to assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

Sounds good. On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Of course, the other thing to do would be going the direction of helpful suggestions:

1) When creating a resource (pages, spaces, wikis) we can propose resources that already exist similar to the entered name. This solves both casing and spelling issues. The point is to avoid creation of similar resources when reusing would have been the best way to go.

2) When landing on a non-existing resource, we can suggest similar resources instead of just showing the standard "resource not found" message. This covers URL mistyping and outdated links. Side Note: Perhaps we could do some sort of similar improvement to wiki links that, when a document does not exist, directly point to edit the new page. Instead, they could point to the wiki creation step with prefilled form values and suggestions. Other ideas might exist here.

Big +1 for these. Something like:

* Create page "test" -> "There is already a page named 'Test'. Are you sure you wan to create a new page?" * Go to /Space/test -> "Did you mean 'Test'?" / "Are you looking for 'Test'?"

...

General example: User enters "test" and the UI suggests both "Test" (casing) and "testing" (possible mistyping) existing resources.

We can use Solr.

Thanks, Marius

...

This would probably be the simplest to implement without significant performance problems. However, this would be just UI candy and the platform would be left the way it is, a free-for-all.

Thanks, Eduard

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Pretty much the same comments here.

On personal side this is one of the thing I hate about Windows ("just do what the hell I told you to do and don't try to be clever").

On technical side everyone should understand that this is a huge refactoring that will produce regressions for at least one year. Another things is that it's slower so performance are going to be worst in most of the XWiki code.

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:

...

I'm undecided. As a technical Linux user I prefer case sensitivity, but I can see why this is sometimes unexpected for non-technical users. I'm not sure how you plan to implement this. I know this thread is not about the technical aspects but still I think it's important to consider the cost that this change will imply.

First, even for a case insensitive system, I think it's very important to preserve the case entered by the user. For instance, If I create a user with the alias 'myCoolAlias' then I wouldn't like to see 'mycoolalias' displayed in the UI. Same, if I attach a file named 'myCoolPresentation.odp' then I want to see precisely that name on the list of attachments. So we need to store case sensitive values in the database. The difference from now will be:

* when creating an entity: check that there's no other entity that has the same normalized reference (toLowerCase/toUpperCase)

* when retrieving an entity: look for normalized references

This means we'll have to call toLowerCase/toUpperCase very often so we need proper database indexes. Otherwise we'll have a performance impact.

Second, we have lots of places that query the database and since we have to store the raw case-sensitive values then we need to update all this places. Moreover, since it's not about a single field/column I'm not sure we can write a query filter to lower the case automatically. Then we also have a lot of extensions that query the database and that create entities. Those will have to be updated too.

Lastly, AFAIK lower case and upper case are locale dependent. The 'lower' query function doesn't have a locale parameter so it depends on the locale the database has been configured with. So there can be cases when a user won't be able to retrieve an entity using some locale dependent lowercase version of the reference because the database computes the lower case differently than what the user expects (because it uses a different locale).

Thanks,

Marius

On Nov 7, 2014 12:34 PM, "Eduard Moraru" <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small

letters

...

or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different resources.

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe to assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:

Pretty much the same comments here.

On personal side this is one of the thing I hate about Windows ("just do what the hell I told you to do and don't try to be clever").

I agree with that, but on the practical aspects, how often do you need to have in the same folder all the following files: - "test - "TEST" - "Test" ? Also, as Marius pointed out, the FAT/Windows filesystem is case sensitive, it just has an uniqueness constraint, so you can name stuff however you want to, just don`t have duplicates because you will quickly make a mess of yourself. It's easy to use the above argument for various cases, however IMO our goal should be to write useful software, and the features we are discussing here are mainly targeting the users, not the admins. My logic tells me that users are more interested in resources and not in resource names. ("potato, patato" [1] - see the OP on same resource, multiple names because of casing). Thanks, Eduard ---------- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc3Fn7R9mkE

On technical side everyone should understand that this is a huge refactoring that will produce regressions for at least one year. Another things is that it's slower so performance are going to be worst in most of the XWiki code.

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:

...

I'm undecided. As a technical Linux user I prefer case sensitivity, but I can see why this is sometimes unexpected for non-technical users. I'm not sure how you plan to implement this. I know this thread is not about the technical aspects but still I think it's important to consider the cost that this change will imply.

First, even for a case insensitive system, I think it's very important to preserve the case entered by the user. For instance, If I create a user with the alias 'myCoolAlias' then I wouldn't like to see 'mycoolalias' displayed in the UI. Same, if I attach a file named 'myCoolPresentation.odp' then I want to see precisely that name on the list of attachments. So we need to store case sensitive values in the database. The difference from now will be:

* when creating an entity: check that there's no other entity that has the same normalized reference (toLowerCase/toUpperCase)

* when retrieving an entity: look for normalized references

This means we'll have to call toLowerCase/toUpperCase very often so we need proper database indexes. Otherwise we'll have a performance impact.

Second, we have lots of places that query the database and since we have to store the raw case-sensitive values then we need to update all this places. Moreover, since it's not about a single field/column I'm not sure we can write a query filter to lower the case automatically. Then we also have a lot of extensions that query the database and that create entities. Those will have to be updated too.

Lastly, AFAIK lower case and upper case are locale dependent. The 'lower' query function doesn't have a locale parameter so it depends on the locale the database has been configured with. So there can be cases when a user won't be able to retrieve an entity using some locale dependent lowercase version of the reference because the database computes the lower case differently than what the user expects (because it uses a different locale).

Thanks,

Marius

On Nov 7, 2014 12:34 PM, "Eduard Moraru" <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs case insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small

letters

...

or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different resources.

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe to assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement: http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would you prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 2:18 PM, Thomas Mortagne <[email protected]> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Eduard Moraru <[email protected]> wrote:

...

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Thomas Mortagne < [email protected]> wrote:

...

Pretty much the same comments here.

On personal side this is one of the thing I hate about Windows ("just do what the hell I told you to do and don't try to be clever").

I agree with that, but on the practical aspects, how often do you need to have in the same folder all the following files: - "test - "TEST" - "Test" ?

Also, as Marius pointed out, the FAT/Windows filesystem is case sensitive, it just has an uniqueness constraint, so you can name stuff however you want to, just don`t have duplicates because you will quickly make a mess of yourself.

It's easy to use the above argument for various cases, however IMO our goal should be to write useful software, and the features we are discussing here are mainly targeting the users, not the admins. My logic tells me that users are more interested in resources and not in resource names. ("potato, patato" [1] - see the OP on same resource, multiple names because of casing).

It's not so much about common use case that the fact that having two files with different cases do exist (because pretty much everything that is not system dependent is case sensitive) but in Windows I won't be able to just download them without having to think about it and if they are in a zip, just unzip it won't work, if there is such files in a git repository I won't be able to clone or update it on Windows, etc. Also because Windows is so clever you simply can't change your file's case, you have to rename your file to something that does not match and then rename it to what you really want. On the other hand having two files with different cases in a folder never was an issue in any way for me on Linux.

In other words being sure that I can copy/download/import anything anywhere without having to worry about path size, support characters, getting conflict that never really existed, etc... is of more interest to me than being totally lost (it's so complex to understand, right) because I have two files with different case in a folder.

I don't really see how stating that I'm not annoyed by the right things and saying that Windows is actually great with the use case I'm not having is going to help the debate. I already said that I have a technical point of view and having matching between two files of different case can be of some interest for basic users.

In the use case of XWiki what I don't like is similar to what I explained for Windows which is that I don't like too much changing the whole platform to make impossible to support something that might be a real use case for any reason, impossible to import a XAR with two pages having different case, impossible to attach files with different case because you need it to be that way because you are using a tool that needs it that way, etc... Basically I don't like adding a limitation that is far from being a universal limitation.

Well, yes. In Windows you will always have frustrations when making it work with other systems that don`t have uniqueness constraints, so it`s obvious you will have problems. In XWiki`s case, at some point you should not have a XAR with 2 documents with different casing in the same space, except if dealing with older versions. (migrations from other wiki systems is another case when you might hit this). For attachments I was not proposing an uniqueness constraint since the collision chance is higher (files coming from different folders on the user's HDD end up in the same space, so c:\test.txt and d:\Test.txt both end up in Main.SomeDocument => collision). Also, it's easy to spot a collision on an attachment since you see the list of attachments you have uploaded. When creating a document, your focus is narrowed and you don`t really see documents "around you". Anyway, your points are valid and I agree that we should probably just avoid all the confusion caused by this costly transition. I guess the UI suggestion improvements is the only thing we are left with at the moment. Sure, we could try adding uniqueness constraints just at an UI level, which could also be configurable, while the platform would remain free to do whatever it wishes, just as long as the UI is always aware that duplicates, even if not allowed to, could still exist. Of course, being an UI thing, it would not be guaranteed, even if enabled, since each application could do whatever it wishes in its UI or its components; so more of a "hit or miss" if anyone tries to enable it. Thanks, Eduard

...

Thanks, Eduard

---------- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc3Fn7R9mkE

...

On technical side everyone should understand that this is a huge refactoring that will produce regressions for at least one year. Another things is that it's slower so performance are going to be worst in most of the XWiki code.

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:24 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea <[email protected]> wrote:

...

I'm undecided. As a technical Linux user I prefer case sensitivity,

but I

...

...

...

can see why this is sometimes unexpected for non-technical users. I'm not sure how you plan to implement this. I know this thread is not about the technical aspects but still I think it's important to consider the cost that this change will imply.

First, even for a case insensitive system, I think it's very important to preserve the case entered by the user. For instance, If I create a user with the alias 'myCoolAlias' then I wouldn't like to see 'mycoolalias' displayed in the UI. Same, if I attach a file named 'myCoolPresentation.odp' then I want to see precisely that name on the list of attachments. So we need to store case sensitive values in the database. The difference from now will be:

* when creating an entity: check that there's no other entity that has the same normalized reference (toLowerCase/toUpperCase)

* when retrieving an entity: look for normalized references

This means we'll have to call toLowerCase/toUpperCase very often so we need proper database indexes. Otherwise we'll have a performance impact.

Second, we have lots of places that query the database and since we have to store the raw case-sensitive values then we need to update all this places. Moreover, since it's not about a single field/column I'm not sure we can write a query filter to lower the case automatically. Then we also have a lot of extensions that query the database and that create entities. Those will have to be updated too.

Lastly, AFAIK lower case and upper case are locale dependent. The 'lower' query function doesn't have a locale parameter so it depends on the locale the database has been configured with. So there can be cases when a user won't be able to retrieve an entity using some locale dependent lowercase version of the reference because the database computes the lower case differently than what the user expects (because it uses a different locale).

Thanks,

Marius

On Nov 7, 2014 12:34 PM, "Eduard Moraru" <[email protected]> wrote:

...

Hi users and devs,

I would like to have your opinion on the topic of case sensitive vs

case

...

insensitive and which one you prefer in XWiki.

Currently, XWiki is case sensitive. This means the same resource name (document name, space name, etc) can be written with either small letters or big letters or a mix.

Examples: You can have both "Main.Test" and "Main.test" as 2 different documents. Also, you can have "XWiki.Admin" and "XWiki.admin" as 2 different users. This also applies to URLs, as "/Main/Test" is different from "/Main/test" or "/main/test", so all these 3 are different resources.

Even from this short description, one can already identify possible problems of this approach.

From the top 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac an Windows), only Linux is case sensitive, the other two (more user-focused Operating Systems) are both case insensitive.

Since XWiki has one of its main targets the Enterprise users, it is safe to assume that the correct approach would be to also be more user-focused and simplify things and avoid confusions by being case insensitive as well.

Also, a quick search on existing issues validates the need for this improvement:

http://jira.xwiki.org/issues/?jql=text%20~%20%22case%20insensitive%22

...

What do you think? Is it OK to keep XWiki case sensitive, or would

you

...

prefer it case insensitive? Bring arguments.

I have also created a jira issue for this idea: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11412 to track it in the future.

Thanks, Eduard _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

---

devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs

-- Thomas Mortagne _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs