Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: .mt-attrs formatting

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

In message <address@hidden> on Thu, 19 Aug 2004 15:14:14 -0400, "graydon hoare" 
<address@hidden> said:

graydon> eh, actually, I would prefer to:
graydon> 
graydon>   - stick with one space
graydon>   - change the regex to handle files with leading whitespace in names

So let's see if I get you right, you're saying that you want one
insignificant space followed by a number (0 or more) spaces,
potentially looking exactly the same as that first insignificant one.

I don't know how else to say this: from a technical point of view,
fine.  From a usability and user interface point of view, I find that
to be a horrible idea, riddled with confusion and error prone as a
result.  Just look at the confusion it has created already.  Let's not
forget that as much hackers as we may be, we're also human, and there
will always be a number of confused people who will get the space
count wrong, thus increasing the number of user support calls/emails,
potentially becoming a FAQ that very gently says "you didn't count
your spaces correctly, dummy!"

The existence of tabs will not make matters better, trust me.  I
noticed that you do span over [^[:space:]] to find non-space stuff,
while you use an actual space to match the delimiter itself.  This
means that while you allow a tab to act as a delimiter, you will then
refuse to accept the tab as a delimiter.

I suggest that it should be possible to enclose a file name with
quotes (single or double, I don't care), for the sake of clarity.

Or have a completely different delimiter than space.  I've no idea
what syntax you're imagining that basic_io.cc would handle...

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/