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

From: Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
Date: Oct 28, 2010, 21:17 UTC
Message-ID: <EFFE2D68-BBA3-4EF4-B56A-AA4882EDE1E4@sb.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v39rqb1ji.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Oct 28, 2010, at 11:44 AM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:
> 
> [jc: why do you send messages with toooooooooooo loooooong lines sometimes
> and normal line lengths some other times...?]

I use a GUI mail client to write email. Anything I copy&paste is hard-wrapped, anything I write directly tends to not include hard linebreaks at all. Would it be better if I hard-wrapped my lines?

Show 18 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 28fba29 (Do not quote SP., 2005-10-17) explicitly addressed a breakage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.

I agree that SP in pathnames in source is insane, but it's perfectly common to do when working with non-source files. For example, in the project I'm using right now, I have a file named "Application 1.0.xcdatamodel" and another named "Application 1.1.xcdatamodel". These are data files and their name on disk matches the name given to them in the IDE. In this case, I think the SP is perfectly justified. Granted, having " -> " in your pathname is also pretty insane, but my motivation here is just ensuring that the --porcelain format is parseable even if you are insane.

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

That's what I was thinking. I'll look into doing just that.

-Kevin Ballard