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bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable


From: Ruediger Meier
Subject: bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 23:13:25 +0100
User-agent: KMail/1.9.10

On Tuesday 16 February 2016, Jon Stanley wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Ruediger Meier <address@hidden> 
wrote:
> > No! IMO Newbies should learn (most painful as possible!) that
> > non-ascii filenames sucks. :) Maybe ls shouldn't show them at all
> > by default ;)
>
> I normally lurk on this list, but this leads me to *vehemently*
> disagree. This is a top FAQ amongst new users, and I think that we
> (as an open source community, I don't personally have a single commit
> in coreutils) have a responsibility to make our ecosystem welcoming
> and accessible to new users. This change, IMO, does exactly that, and
> will save countless hours of supporting new users through the
> intricate mechanisms of shell escapes and why they are necessary.
> Quite obvious to you and I, not so much to new users. Anything that
> we can do to ease their learning curve (ideally, while teaching them
> something) is IMO a positive step.

Do you really think that this ls output is clear to a newbie?
$ ls
'a?b'  'a'$'\n''b'  axb  c  'd  e'

allthough in dolphin shows up like:
1    2   3     4   5
a?b  a   axb   c   d  e
     b

Do you really think that a newbie will know between which quotes and 
spaces to copy/paste the right file name?

And why do we only care about newbies? Other people have used these 
commands for +20 years. To not bother the "power users" is IMO much 
more important.

I've choosed to use the command line because it's more reliable, stable 
interfaces, appearance and output. That's why I (and many others) 
choosed these command line tools rather than file-browers which look 
completely different between any release or are not even availabe on 
different systems.

It doesn't matter if you like the new format or not. This quick change 
of the default to an even untested new (never released before!) format 
was clearly over the top. Please revert.

cu,
Rudi





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