Subject: Default quoting of file names by ls (coreutils)

From: Joshua Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 07:27:53 -0400

The output of "ls" automatically quotes results that include special
characters or spaces. I've already found this page:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html

I'm aware that the maintainers have no plans to revert the behavior, and
I'm aware of the work arounds.

This email is just to register another complaint / disagreement. The page
above notes, "GNU Coreutils maintainers are of the opinion that this change
is beneficial to most users". It's not beneficial to me and has caused a
fair bit of work to restore the old behavior across a few hundred systems.
I suspect that many users have yet to see this new behavior, as many of us
run distributions with older utilities (ex. RHEL 7.x).

FWIW, I'm firmly of the opinion that this should have been implemented at
the distribution level as an addition to the default "ls" alias, leaving
the default behavior of unadulterated /bin/ls use as-is (ie. behaving as
--quoting-style=literal). That said, I don't know where you go from here,
cause you've already committed to this change and it's all over the place
now, and reverting would then cause a third condition... I'd still support
reverting, but I realize that's unlikely, so don't worry about convincing
me of why you won't revert.

In the future, for new behavior such as this, I implore you to please stage
the change in steps:
* add an option to enable the behavior
* encourage distros to make that the default for their distro via aliases
* if $N percent of distros pick it up, then consider making it the actual
default with an option to disable it

Thank you,
--
Josh I.