On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 14:58 -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le mardi 16 décembre 2008 à 15:16 -0500, Bill Nottingham a écrit :
I fail to see how using the neutral quote character ", a perfectly valid standard unicode character, is the road to incompatible software and piles of quirks.
And I didn't object to «"», I object to using accents instead of quote characters.
And I didn't see anyone disagree. You do, however, seem to be advocating "fancy" quotes over ", which still sees far more usage (and which everyone knows how to type).
The problem is that PK currently alters the description text (I think mainly to work around a bug/feature¹) substituting "fancy quotes" for "normal" quotes (which I think is why this thread started, to try and fix that in the packages!). Nicolas thinks tools altering the data in this way is bad, and I tend to agree, with descriptions being what they are now it's not possible to know that the alteration is always good. He also seems to haave a secondary argument that for lists, using o is bad but ∘ is good. I'm not sure I agree there, but I see his point.
Personally I think the use of '"', ., *, •, o or ∘ ... are fine, just as long as all the tools are displaying the same non-invisible bytes².
¹ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459155
² Changing whitespace is different, I think, so the tools can do readable wrapping ... but I'm prepared to be shown we shouldn't do that in yum/whatever either (what we have now is certainly somewhat magic).