From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:10:36 GMT
Subject: Re: URL decoding changed semantics of + in URLs
Message-ID: <AANLkTinsixPihZRtduuB_0puX_ucC0HYqHPU0UJMX2e-@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201007231518.31071.trast@student.ethz.ch>

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 13:18, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> wrote:

> doesn't say much about + and the only escaping defined is the usual
> %xx style.  So is there a standard that mandates this, or was it just
> a well-meaning but unnecessary backwards incompatible change?

+ and %20 are as far as I know only interchangable in *query strings*,
so having to clone 'git://git.gnome.org/gtk%2B' where you could
previously clone 'git://git.gnome.org/gtk+' is a bug. Git shouldn't be
changing that + to a %20.

I haven't followed why we need to escape + to %20 at all, even in the
query string. E.g. curl(1) doesn't do that before sending requests to
Apache, which can handle either one. The + v.s. %20 duality is always
handled at the server AFAIK.