Re: [Monotone-devel] Messages in monotone

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 07:06:33AM +0100, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
> - It's really hellish to try to format messages with explicit \n in
>   them, especially if the contain argument directives so you're
>   without formatting control anyway.  It would probably look nicer if
>   the code that displays messages broke it up in somewhat good looking
>   lines.
>
> - If we're going to break messages into lines in the code, we need to
>   figure out how to code unbreakable spaces.  An idea is to borrow ~
>   from TeX as the unbrakable space.

I think we might even have some reflow code somewhere, for the
filename lists in log output...

> - File and directory names are sometimes quoted, sometimes not.  Same
>   goes for other strings as well.  I recall that there's been talk of
>   cleaning up before, maybe we need to do so again, if it was ever
>   done to begin with?
>   Maybe we need to agree on quoting or not to begin with?  My vote
>   goes to quoting file and directory names, since they can have spaces
>   in them.

I think I discussed at the summit some, my vote is a piece of code
that always runs to format filenames for user display.  We need
something like this to get charsets right already.  Then this code
could have logic which formats filenames like:

  "foo" -> "'foo'"
  "foo bar" -> "'foo bar'"
  "" -> "'' (root directory)"

The last one is the interesting special case...

Since we have logic here anyway, we could even make the quotes
typographically correct if want to be super-clever and happen to know
that the user is in a unicode locale :-).

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself
 Outside the ordinary range
 Of what are called statistics."
  -- Stephan Spender