Re: Stupid quoting...

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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.

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.

By the way, the pathname quoting done by "diff" does not even
attempt to tackle that.  I already explained why in the thread
so I would not repeat myself.

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