Re: ls is broken, what's next cd?

[Kamil Dudka]

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 3:31:11 PM CET Eric Blake wrote:
> On 02/06/2018 03:38 AM, Kamil Dudka wrote:
> > I do not need to search as I have been following the discussions in real
> > time. It is always the same.  GNU coreutils authors explain why changing
> > the default was a good idea whereas all other users explain why the
> > change was unexpected at best and desperately ask for revert.
> 
> This is a logical fallacy, you are relying on confirmation bias.  The
> users that are complaining are quite possibly a disproportionate set of
> overall users.  The users that are not bothered by the change, or have
> not even noticed it, or which even appreciate the changes, are not
> complaining.

Why?  They could have replied to any of those threads and said "please keep 
the current default, I like it" but they didn't.

> But there is no easy way to determine which percentage of
> the population are opposed to the new default, vs. those which are okay
> with the new default, because only those opposed to the default are
> complaining on the list.

Just revert the change and you will see whether anybody will complain or not.

> > The question is *not* which quoting style is better default.  The question
> > is whether GNU coreutils users appreciate the *change* of the well-known
> > default.
> The change has already been made.  Even if we now revert it, users still
> have to deal with versions in the wild that have the change.

If you revert it now, the change will not be observable by users of Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux as well as many other distributions with long term support.

Kamil

> So since
> users already have to deal with it, they might as well always have to
> deal with it.  We prefer a default of erring on the side of safety when
> it comes to output that is ambiguous or could corrupt a terminal, but
> leave enough knobs that you can customize a different default for your
> preferred setup.