Re: Bug Emacs 21.3: write-file downcasing

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> That adds to the weight of the need.  Still, I would much rather
> we could avoid the need to compare file names using anything other
> than string=.

Even on GNU and similar systems, it is probably better to compare
inodes than strings to determine if two files are the same file.
That would deal with case-insensitive filesystems where they exist on
those platforms.

There are already places in the Emacs code where inodes are used (to
deal with hard-links), making a function available for lisp to do
such a comparison and encouraging people to use it rather than string=
seems like a good thing to me.