Re: Stupid quoting...

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jun 20, 2007, 07:49 UTC
Message-ID: <86y7ifoykt.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
In-Reply-To: <7vd4zrw3k4.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.pobox.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>
>>> I don't see our discourse leading anywhere: the points have been made.
>>
>> I would really, really, really like to see a solution. Alas, I
>> cannot think of one, other than _forcing_ the developers to use
>> ASCII-only filenames.

And ASCII-only files.  Just eradicate that dreaded Bit 7 from the world.

Show 17 quoted lines

>> Note that there is no convention yet in Git to state which encoding
>> your filenames are supposed to use. And in fact, we already had a
>> fine example in git.git why this is particularly difficult. MacOSX
>> is too clever to be true, in that it gladly takes filenames in one
>> encoding, but reads those filenames out in _another_
>> encoding. Thus, a "git add <filename>" can well end up in
>> git-status saying that a file was deleted, and another file
>> (actually the same, but in a different encoding) is untracked.
>
> Having said that, the absolute minimum that needs to be quoted are
> double-quote (because it is used by quoting as agreed with GNU
> diff/patch maintainer), backslash (used to introduce C-like
> quoting),
> newline and horizontal tab (makes "patch" confused, as it would make
> it ambiguous where the pathname ends), so I am not opposed to a
> patch that introduces a new mode, probably on by default _unless_ we
> are generating --format=email, that does not quote high byte values.

I think it would be ok to quote non-graphic characters with octal escape sequences. On ASCII-based systems, those are the characters 0x00 to 0x1f. They don't have a visual representation of their own, anyway. _IF_ they appear in filenames, it is certainly a case involved with excessive cleverness and/or garbage. I'd leave the rest alone.

> That would solve "My UTF-8 filenames are unreadable on my terminal"
> problem.

But there is no point if the most primitive of mail readers does a better job than listing the directory will.

7-Bit terminals are the wrong thing to use for manipulating 8-bit-encoded files, period. And the escape sequences for 8-bit terminals are quite certain to start with characters in the 0x00 to 0x1f range.

-- 
David Kastrup