EXT4 Patches Continue Working On Case-Insensitive Filenames & Encoding

For those that have been wanting to see case-insensitive filename support or even encoding of filenames in UTF-8 or other character encoding, the work is still on going.

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi of Collabora has been working on this encoding-aware file-name look-ups for the EXT4 file-system and as part of that allowing case-insensitive filenames. The patches are now up to their fifth revision in recent months, but is going back a bit to the drawing board at the "request for comments" stage following some critiques to the design by Linus Torvalds.

Ultimately this work is allowing file-system wide character set knowledge for file-names and providing support for case-insensitive file-names. As part of this implementation, the case-insensitive support can be managed on a per-directory basis so say all of your system directories remain the same but files within your home directory could be treated as case-insensitive.

More details on this work and the currently experimental patches can be found via this mailing list series.