Re: Contributors and maintainers

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: address@hidden (Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı/Kammer)
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 19:22:10 +0200
>> 
>> >> Can you please show a previous quote by you which serves to show that
>> >> you understood the reason I did not want to use shell-quote-argument,
>> >> and where you directly addressed that exact reason (either with a change
>> >> to shell-quote-argument, *or* an explanation of why you disagree with
>> >> that exact reason)?
>> >
>> > Everything I wrote serves to show that.  I always responded to your
>> > arguments.
>> >
>> >> When you show such a quote, then maybe we can look at it and see how it
>> >> could be that you feel my concern has been addressed, yet I don't.
>> >
>> > Not only I feel that your concerns has been addressed, everyone else
>> > here does.
>> 
>> It would be great if you could provide a quote like I mentioned.
>
> OK.  Here are some:

Thanks. :-)

> Quote #1:
>
>   > > On POSIX shells, shell-quote-argument is just as safe as
>   > > shqq--quote-string, and on non-POSIX shells it works better. So it's a
>   > > win, in both readability and in portability, to use
>   > > shell-quote-argument.
>   > 
>   > Fixing it does not seem easy at all given I can't trust
>   > shell-quote-argument.
>
>   You can trust it.
>
>   > And please be realistic in the amount of trust we can put on the
>   > complicated implementations for non-Unix shells.  I can't judge them
>   > myself since I don't know the syntax of those shells at all.  Does
>   > anyone here know their syntax comprehensively, or checked the
>   > implementation against the documentation of those shells?
>
>   Yes, we do.  Yes, we have.

This coincided with Random832's demonstration of it being broken for
csh, and mentioning that the semantics are questionable on Windows if I
got it right, as well as a mention of a past bug about newline handling
for POSIX shells.  So I'm afraid you were short of lying to me.  And
please don't get me wrong but the annoyed and dismissive tone really
made it obvious that not much thought was put into the response in first
place, so the factual inaccuracy was not exactly a surprise.

> Quote #2:
>
>   > > It might be simpler, but it's wrong, because the result is only
>   > > correct for Posix shells.
>   > >
>   > > Please do use shell-quote-argument instead.
>   > 
>   > It's also simpler than the POSIX section of shell-quote-argument.
>
>   Simpler doesn't mean correct.
>
>   > (defun shell-quote-argument (argument)
>   >   [...] (cond [...] (t
>   >     (if (equal argument "")
>   >         "''"
>   >       ;; Quote everything except POSIX filename characters.
>   >       ;; This should be safe enough even for really weird shells.
>   >       (replace-regexp-in-string
>   >        "\n" "'\n'"
>   >        (replace-regexp-in-string "[^-0-9a-zA-Z_./\n]" "\\\\\\&" 
> argument))))))
>   > 
>   > I wonder what "really weird shells" this refers to?
>
>   The set of characters special to an arbitrary shell is not known in
>   advance.
>
>   > Certainly not csh, the mechanism it uses for newlines doesn't work
>   > there.
>
>   What did you try that didn't work with csh?

This is unrelated to the main concern of lacking safety guarantees.

It's also not a response to me.

> Quote #3:
>
>   > Quoting RMS, coincidentally from a couple days ago:
>   > 
>   >     The policy is non-GNU systems are secondary, and lower priority than
>   >     the GNU system, but we are glad to include support for them in GNU
>   >     packages if users contribute the necessary code -- provided that
>   >     code isn't a maintenance problem for us.
>   > 
>   >     The maintenainers of any particular package are the ones who judge
>   >     whether that code is a maintenance problem, since they are the ones
>   >     it would be a problem for.
>
>   I don't see how this is relevant for the issue at hand, since the
>   necessary code (the shell-quote-argument function) was already
>   contributed to Emacs years ago, and is used in many places in core
>   Emacs.  There's no extra effort needed to support more platforms, just
>   replace one function with another.
>
>   > I generally don't want to take responsibility of my code being used on
>   > non-GNU/non-POSIX systems, but if I can share the responsibility then
>   > that's fine.
>
>   You are sharing the responsibility with a long line of Emacs
>   developers, all of whom use this function.  I don't see anything you
>   should worry about, really.

This tries to push on me a responsibility I cannot take because I don't
use MS Windows and don't know its shell syntax, and asserts that I
should stop worrying, i.e. flat-out dismissing my concern.

> As you see, each response is directly related to your text that I
> cite.  I cannot prove to you that I understood what you were saying,
> but you can ask any neutral person to read this and tell you what they
> think about that.  From my side, I can assure you I completely
> understood everything that you said.

It seems that we cannot even agree on whether an English sentence does
or doesn't address a concern raised in another.

English is not my mother-tongue either, but I think both our English is
perfectly good.  Given that, I genuinely have no idea how we can be this
badly unable to communicate.

I rest my case.

Taylan