Case-insensitive ext4: just say no!

I am dismayed to learn that ext4 was changed in linux kernel 5.2 to be case insensitive (strictly speaking, to allow it as an option). This is truly terrible and will come back to bite us all. See this kernel.org posting for details. But here are just a few thoughts: Is it really going to be case insensitive? I doubt it. There are some environments in which there is a requirement for filenames to contain both uppercase and lowercase characters. Java springs to mind where the filename maps directly to the class name. Of course one could start to code entirely in lowercase but what about those classes that have already been written? What happens when the source is moved to an ext4 partition that has this feature? I strongly suspect that when they say case-insensitive what they actually mean is case-preserving, like MS-Windows. The fact that this has not been called out shows that the functionality has not been considered very deeply. People have two confused two unrelated issues: the issue of filenames supporting case and the issue of applications making the case of filenames irrelevant or not. If the filesystem is case-preserving then applications will still need to cope with this by being case-blind where they think this is what the user wants. Putting this into the file system itself is completely wrong. IMAO. There are several changes being made to linux which I don't like and this is another in a growing list:

• systemd. I notice now that more and more linux software that is available through a distro's package management system is dependent (transitively) on systemd. I anticipate a day where practically every package has this dependency.
• The Out Of Memory (OOM) Killer. I've already blogged about this.
• btfs not supporting datetime last accessed.