Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [MERGE REQUEST] changeset translation preparatory work

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 01:50, Tom Lord wrote:
 
> Look at it this way:  it turns out that your shell has a bug.   There
> are certain perfectly legitimate, perfectly legal filenames that, if
> actually used, cause your shell to spazz.
>
> What's to do about this?  You describe yourself and the others you
> cite making a similar complaint as "hackers".  I believe you.  Hackers
> would respond to this annoyance by fixing it --- fix your damn shell.
> So, that's what you should do.

My shell could be better, for sure.  Right now it basically assumes that
when you type a {, you always mean it in the metacharacter sense (unless
it's quoted of course).  But even if it was changed to allow you to do
completions using { as a regular character, you'd still have to do more
work to tell the shell in which sense you mean it.  The Linux kernel
actually has a directory called "arch".  If I hit {a<TAB>, I could be
talking about either.  zsh is actually pretty nice in that it lets you
cycle between completions, so I could hit {a<TAB> to get a list, <TAB>
to pick the first one, then <TAB> to pick the second.  In bash, you just
wouldn't be able to complete it.  All this pain comes from using shell
metacharacters in filenames users were expected to manipulate (I say
"were", because with my inventory patches you shouldn't have to
anymore).  There's really no reason to use shell metacharacters in
filenames.  They're just not worth the pain they cause, even in an ideal
world where every shell handles them as gracefully as possible, and
every user's machine in the world has been magically upgraded.

But anyways, as I mentioned I don't care about seeing {arch} if I don't
actually have to manipulate it or filenames inside it, and that's what
address@hidden/tla--inventory--1.3--patch-1
address@hidden/tla--inventory--1.3--patch-2
are all about.  Once those are in, I will be more or less completely
happy on this issue.

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