GNU bug report logs - #24926
ls-quotes: ls output has been made ugly

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Message #29 received at 24926 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
To: "L. A. Walsh" <coreutils <at> tlinx.org>
Cc: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, 24926 <at> debbugs.gnu.org,
 Michael Schwager <mike <at> schwager.com>
Subject: Re: bug#24926: ls output has been made ugly
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 15:23:32 -0600

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 11/11/2016 03:08 PM, L. A. Walsh wrote:
> 
> 
> Eric Blake wrote:
>>>>  touch 'a b' c
>>
>> That's your problem.  Paul did:
>>
>> $ touch 'a  b' c
> ----
>     He didn't list his creation command.  How
> would you know?

Because that's what worked for me to reproduce his commands.

> 
> 
>> with two spaces, not one.
> ---
> You are assuming that.  But if he didn't list how
> he created them...

He didn't have to. His point was merely that with the old ls, you can
have inherently ambiguous situations.  Think of it as an exercise for
the reader to figure out ways to get into those ambiguous situations.

Knowing the pitfalls makes it easier to justify why an output that is
unambiguous was chosen as the new default over the previous ambiguous
output; any further changes to the default are now a matter of
fine-tuning about how much (or how little) decoration we can get away
with, while still avoiding a regression to the situation of ambiguous
output.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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