bug#22696: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Jon Stanley]

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.

$0.02