Case Sensitivity and New Developers
I believe, though have no factual data to support this belief, that most developers these days are learning to code on Windows with some IDE - like Eclipse, NetBeans, etc. It's the easiest way to learn to code, I'll grant you, and it's the cheapest platform to use. Heck, you can get a decent Windows laptop at BestBuy for under $800. Peanuts.
But there's a good contingent that seems to have fallen in love with the Free Software movement, and picked up linux to put on their $800 laptop, and are using Eclipse on linux. This is not bad. But it's the clash of these two worlds that often leads to problems.
Then again... it could just be that the developers aren't all that good, and need to be whipped into shape before they're set loose on the codebase.
So here's what happened today: I'm trying to clone this git repository onto a windows box because the way I have the monitors hooked up, it's easiest to see the code from the Windows screen. My first problem was with the git that ships with Cygwin. Turns out, if there's a problem with the repo (as there was - sort-of), the Cygwin git gets all messed up. Maybe in a subsequent release they'll get it fixed, but the consensus at The Shop is that the better solution is to get msysgit from Google Code.
(As an aside, I've also decided to upgrade my Cygwin to 1.7.7 as it seems I was pretty out of date, and that could possibly have contributed to the problems.)
So I clone this repository and I find that I've already got a changed file. Hmmm... that's odd... so I check that file out again... still changed. Very odd.
Turns out, the developer had created two files - one a Java source file, the other a shell script - one named MyTest.java, the other myTest.java. OK... that's got all kinds of wrong written all over it. Case is not the way to distinguish files - not in the multi-platform world. And who makes a shell script have an extension of .java?
When I pointed this out to him, he cleaned it up and there wasn't a problem any longer. But it reminded me that what I take for granted is not exactly universally understood.