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).
--
James Antill <james(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora