I noticed that these days __file__ attributes of modules are case normalized (ie. lowercased on case insensitive file systems), or at least the directory part. Then I noticed that this is caused by the fact that all sys.path entries are case normalized. It turns out that site.py does this, in a function called makepath(), added by Fred about 8 months ago.
I think this is wrong: we should always try to *preserve* case.
There is an added problem with the makepath() stuff that I hadn't reported here yet: it has broken MacPython on some non-western machines. Specifically I've had reports of people running a Japanese MacOS that things will break if they run Python from a pathname that has any non-7-bit-ascii characters in the name. Apparently normcase normalizes more than just ascii upper/lowercase letters. And aside from that I fully agree with Just: seeing a stacktrace with all lowercase filenames is _very_ disconcerting. I would disable the case-normalization for MacPython, except that I don't know whether it actually has a function. With MacPython's way of finding the initial sys.path contents we don't have the Windows-Python problem that we add the same directory 5 times (once in uppercase, once in lowercase, once in mixed case, once in mixed-case with / for \, etc:-), so if this is what it's trying to solve we can take it out easily. -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.oratrix.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm