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

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

Kevin Ballard [off-list ref] 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?

quoted

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28fba29 (Do not quote SP., 2005-10-17) explicitly addressed a breakage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