Don't use single quotes as quotes in command-line parsing on windows?

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 07/11/2009 17:19, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> I certainly remember other people transitioning to bzr (back where I
> worked before I was hired by Canonical), and trying to do:
> 
>  bzr commit -m 'this is some text'
> 
> was very confusing for them that it would fail with:
> 
>   No such file: is

While this quoting style is usual (or mandatory) on Unix, it is not used 
at all on Windows.
And in commit message, preserving single quote meaning as apostrophe is 
even more important... :-)

> I honestly feel that the number of files that will be versioned which
> have an ' in them is very low. Mabye I'm wrong, but I'd like actual
> evidence for that fact.

Perhaps my case is exceptional, but for better or worse, I took the 
habit to drag'n'drop the icon of the address bar of Firefox to an 
Articles folder which is under Bazaar management (articles related to a 
programming language I use).
This has for effect to create an URL link (.URL file) which can be 
double-clicked to open the address in the current default browser.
The advantage over Firefox bookmarks is they are grouped with stuff I do 
in this language, I can synch it on two computers...

Well, you can see yourself such directory:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~philho/%2Bjunk/JavaFX/files/head%3A/Articles/

Note: such created file names are adapted to Windows constraints, so > 
are replaced with », / with nothing, etc. We end up with some Unicode 
characters in filenames, which is problematic when we do bzr log, as 
reported in another thread.

Another use case can be Word documents: by default, Word creates a name 
using the first sentence, which can have apostrophes.
Or a folder named "80's Song Lyrics", etc.

After all, we (well, I) keep to say VCSes should be used beyond the 
strict boundaries of source code management... :-)

> Anyway, Alexander's patch looks fine for removing '' quoting. *I* prefer
> '' quoting so I'm not going to vote approve. However, if the consensus
> is that I'm wrong, then I can certainly be overridden.

A possible solution is to leave that choice to the user...
I would default to " for quoting (on Windows), but allow to use ' with 
some configuration setting.

-- 
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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