On Sat, 2004-06-05 at 18:52, C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> "error: You might need to URI-encode some of your URLs, namely the
> ones that have a percent sign (%) in the decoded path,
> because rather than encourage proper user behavior, we
> want to cater to mindless masses."
Let's try this again, grr.
On the one hand, we have no qualms about users encoding filenames using
their native locale. Non-ascii filenames "just work", and by virtue of
our general silence on the topic, we're implicitly encouraging users to
use them.
But on the other hand, there's a set of strings attached to this feature
which we don't advertise. Sure, you can version control non-ascii
paths, _as long as you understand how to escape them in URIs_. And any
user who deals with branches and tags is going to be using URIs. I
think it's a pretty ridiculous barrier to entry. People who don't
understand rules of URI escaping aren't "mindless masses", it's the
other way around. People who *do* understand URI escaping are elite web
haX0rs.
So there's no nice way out of this problem.
If we do "auto-escaping", then we've got users typing technically
invalid psuedo-urls, with fuzzy rules that convert things most of the
time. And it's hard to explain those rules. And then users start
pasting those fuzzy urls into web browsers and wondering why they don't
work.
But if we keep the status quo, then users are shocked into realization
that they suddenly have to learn how to do URI-escaping. svn comes
across as extremely unfriendly software. . The only fix for this is
education (i.e. explaining in the book, I guess.)
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Received on Sun Jun 6 03:36:08 2004