research-document

Root Case-Collision Canonicalization

Research Area: General Research
Status: draft
Version: 0.1
Priority: medium
Updated: 2026-07-22
Source: docs/repository/2026-07-28-case-collision-canonicalization.md

Root Case-Collision Canonicalization

Problem

Git tracked three case-only path pairs:

README.md and Readme.md
CURRENT-STATE.md and current-state.md
ROADMAP.md and roadmap.md

On the repository’s case-insensitive macOS filesystem, each pair resolves to one working-tree path. An edit intended for the canonical file therefore appeared as a modification to both tracked entries. This undermined canonical state, cross-platform behavior, and evaluation reproducibility.

Evidence

At commit 9b96b13, each pair had identical SHA-256 content:

Pair	SHA-256
README variants	`7fcff95318b7fdfee7a51256d26b7d77e7dd349125562c5cc392c1d01dde9ebf`
current-state variants	`7f148d10c54123824d4942f1c72a0b72c4f76659c861b6b8c9e9c886216fa77c`
roadmap variants	`ec9f095b3043c4e7d2e6134a762865aa34e2e83e2e9e4f4b1f806cbde4f7cd6b`

The bootstrap manifest, import audit, constitution, and agent instructions name the uppercase variants as canonical.

Decision

Keep:

README.md
CURRENT-STATE.md
ROADMAP.md

Remove the lowercase/camelcase variants from the Git index with git rm --cached. The working files remain, and all prior content and provenance remain recoverable from Git history.

Validation

python3 tools/evaluation/evalctl.py repo-audit must report no case collisions.

Reversal

If a case-sensitive environment reveals distinct content that was not captured by the identical-blob audit, recover it from commit 9b96b13 into a clearly named archive file rather than recreating case-only collisions.