On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 11:18:41PM -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote: > Another thing is that it just looks more readable. And the (standard) > diff utility output is nicer (and more helpful). Sure, more helpful > GUI diff programs will show you the exact subsequence which has > changed... But for something so trivial, I can't think of anything > better (hopefully someone else can). I don't see why diffs would be a major concern here. And to the extent that they are, I think that having the file list on a single line (with optional wrapping) is *more* useful, because it means the context for changes will be clearer. > If you have a filename with an \n in it, then you'd need to escape the newline. And presumably also ignore whitespace at the beginning of the line, to avoid having to cope with parsing unindented lines that don't include a field header. So then you have to escape both your newline, *and* any whitespace immediately following the newline, *and* any uses of your escape character. Which is just downright goofy as a set of rules to try to remember when *authoring* these files, which remains the predominant use case at this point. That, and the rules no longer map at all to any escaping scheme recognized by standard commandline tools, so everybody gets to implement their own parser. > In general, the problem is thus: > 1. You have to pick some sort of separator, X. > 2. No matter what, any uses of X anywhere in a filename needs to be escaped > Now, it's easier if X is as infrequently used as possible. vorlon@gluck> cd /srv/lintian.debian.org/laboratory/source vorlon@gluck> find . -name '*,*' | wc -l 9 vorlon@gluck> find . -name '* *' | wc -l 23 vorlon@gluck> That's right, there are a total of *23* files *in all the source packages in all the Debian archive* that have spaces in their filenames; and chances are these are all going to be covered by globs anyway. This is bikeshedding in the extreme. > I'm not saying this is the *most* elegant solution possible. However, > I am saying that it seems like the most elegant solution proposed thus > far (and I'm hoping to hear from others either giving some adjustments > we can make to improve this format, or proposing a much better > alternative). I disagree that it's elegant at all. I think shell-style escaping would be much better. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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