From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:24:33 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4] Introduce %<branch> as shortcut to the tracked branch
Message-ID: <alpine.LNX.2.00.0903211323010.20272@reaper.quantumfyre.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <200903210135.33729.agruen@suse.de>

On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:

> On Saturday, 21 March 2009 0:08:42 Julian Phillips wrote:
>> How about adding a generic escape hatch, that would cover this and
>> future extensions?
>>
>> Let a ref that starts with a single quote be taken as given and not
>> processed.  You have to escape it to get it past the shell, but that makes
>> it rather unlikely that anyone has used a name that starts with a quote -
>> and if they have you can still use this mechanism to rename it.
>
> To me the most obvious escape sequence would be \x for disabling whatever
> special meaning x has (for non-alphabetic x). With quoting you likely
> eventually end up needing  \' in some cases anyway...

Except that \ is the escape character for the shell too ... and that can 
get very confusing.  Haven't you ever spent too long trying to figure out 
how many \s you needed to get the command to work properly?

-- 
Julian

  ---
I'm still waiting for the advent of the computer science groupie.