Windows madness

[Bob Kline]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, David Allen wrote:

> I'm trying to find the cleanest way to get around some windows
> silliness.  Advice is appreciated.
> 
> I'm writing an application under UNIX using Tkinter that I want to
> be portable to Windows.  As fate would have it, I have two files in
> the project with the same name that differ by case.  Example:
> 
> TOOL.py  # Main module for the TOOL
> tool.py  # Small script which just creates objects
>          # the right way, starts the prog, etc.
> 
> As you might guess, this causes problems when they're in the same
> directory.  Furthermore, I can't even combine both of them into
> TOOL.py because when I unzip files on windows machines, it turns
> TOOL.py into "tool.py" and then my "import TOOL" fails since there's
> no file called "TOOL.py"
> 
> Is windows seriously this obtuse that short of separating them by
> directory, I'm forced to merge them into tool.py? (I.e. I don't even
> have the option of using an all-uppercase filename)

Actually, it is possible on NT/Windows 2000 to get tool.py and TOOL.py
into the same directory, using the Posix subsystem.  This is not
recommended, for a number of reasons.

1. It won't work on Windows 9x/ME.
2. The Posix subsystem is disabled on some NT/W2K machines for security.
3. Any non-Posix tools (including, presumably, Python) won't do what you
   want (like reliably reading the right file or not clobbering one with
   the other).

In short, don't do it.

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline at rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com