bug#22698: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Paul Eggert]

On 02/18/2016 08:31 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> keep the new
> option for nice folks like Eric who have this minority use case.

It's not a minority use case, and this is not simply an issue of cutting 
and pasting: it's an issue of having unambigous output. The old behavior 
was ambiguous, and this repeatedly led to confusion.

A couple of other points. First, the change is unlikely to break 
scripts, as it has no effect if the output of 'ls' is a pipe or a file. 
Second, the original Unix 'ls' did not escape file names at all, and GNU 
'ls' had already deviated from its behavior by doing some file-name 
escaping by default when the output is a tty; all that's changed in the 
recent release are details about the default escaping method, to make it 
unambiguous.