Re: `git status --porcelain` disagrees with documentation about quoting filenames with spaces

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 28, 2010, 18:44 UTC
Message-ID: <7v39rqb1ji.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <4AC7298E-73D7-4074-91CD-7C10DE414532@sb.org>

Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:

[jc: why do you send messages with toooooooooooo loooooong lines sometimes and normal line lengths some other times...?]

Show 5 quoted lines

> Given that the removal of quoting for filenames with spaces was an
> intentional change, does anybody have any strong opinions about whether
> we should restore the quotes in this scenario? The alternative is to
> simply change the documentation, but the un-parsability of the
> --porcelain format has me worried.

28fba29 (Do not quote SP., 2005-10-17) explicitly addressed a breakage that quoted pathnames in contexts like this one:

    diff --git a/My Documents/hello.txt b/My Documents/hello.txt

I personally think people who add SP to their pathnames need to get their head examined, and in that sense I do not strongly mind if the pathnames in the above are quoted (that is why the original quotation before the said commit quoted them), but apparently other people did mind. I also think people who have " -> " in their pathnames are even less sane beyond salvation, and between the two insanity, I'd rather help less insane ones by not quoting the above.

The best would probably be to special case SP (which is normally not to be quoted) _only_ in the context of "something" -> "something".