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

Ian Clatworthy ian.clatworthy at canonical.com
Mon Nov 9 13:37:14 GMT 2009


John Arbash Meinel wrote:
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> Alexander Belchenko wrote:
>> John Arbash Meinel пишет:
>>> I *do* want this issue somewhat resolved before release 2.1.0b3, which
>>> I'd like to do early next week (like Monday). The fact that we are
>>> sprinting next week and I'm currently stuck in a hotel room because a
>>> flight delay made me miss the 1 cross-pacific flight is the only reason
>>> I'm responding right now...
>> John, 2.1.0b3 is beta, right? Why you think it will be not possible to
>> remove single quotes before b4? I don't understand.
> 
> We absolutely *can* do it. I personally was hoping a consensus could be
> reached so we don't have to worry about having 2 releases which
> flip-flopped on this issue, and I was willing to delay releasing by a
> day or two if it looked like a consensus could be reached.

John,

Firstly, thank-you for working on this and providing an elegant 
technical solution.

My view is that we ought to fall back to the Principle of Least Surprise 
on each platform, out of the box at least. In this case, Alexander and 
most Windows users don't expect single quotes to work differently in bzr 
to other apps (so they shouldn't).

I do agree that it's also neat if they *optionally* behave as you 
implemented them. Some ways of doing that are via a 
BZR_WIN32_SMART_QUOTING environment variable or setting in bazaar.conf. 
I can see some risks though in a user enabling the behaviour they like 
and accidentally breaking bat scripts (in a plugin say) than assumed 
different quoting behaviour.

Right now, I'd vote to disable the functionality for 2.1.0b3. We can 
then discuss whether having it as an optional feature is worth the 
increase in complexity and, if so, how we mitigate the potential risks.

Ian C.



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