bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Eric Blake]

On 02/16/2016 03:13 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> 
> Do you really think that this ls output is clear to a newbie?
> $ ls
> 'a?b'  'a'$'\n''b'  axb  c  'd  e'

A newbie isn't going to create a file with a newline in it; and the
others seem reasonable to me.

Maybe we could make an effort to quote as "a'b" instead of 'a'\''b', if
there are no ", $, or ` within a name, while still using '' quoting for
everything else.

But I _like_ quoting by default.  It's certainly nicer than representing
$'a\nb' as a?b, and having to guess what the glob expands to.

> It doesn't matter if you like the new format or not. This quick change 
> of the default to an even untested new (never released before!) format 
> was clearly over the top. Please revert.

No, I don't think we should revert.  But I have no problem calling
attention to the fact that you can update your environment to select the
previous behavior as _your_ default, regardless of what we select for
the out-of-the-box default for someone that hasn't updated their initial
environment to request an alternate quoting mode.

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

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