bug#36220: ls -l: maddening mixed left right justifications with numeric ids

[Paul Eggert]

On 6/17/19 8:12 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Patch attached to do as described above

I prefer the current ("maddening") behavior, as it gives the reader a 
useful signal that the user is numeric rather than textual. This is 
particularly important when a user name consists entirely of digits, 
which is allowed on some systems. In that case, left alignment of a 
string like "7777" means it's a textual user name, whereas right 
alignment means it's a numeric user ID. Admittedly the disambiguation is 
not perfect (as there is no cue when the user name has the maximum 
width) but it's helpful in common practice.

I thought this was all documented somewhere - at least, it was a 
conscious decision when I wrote that code long ago.