Coreutils - rejected feature requests
60 points by ryan-duve
60 points by ryan-duve
Dang… I would have liked to have seen Unicode arrows in ls. We don’t mean hyphen + greater than, we mean rightward arrow & that’s exactly what → means.
in the ever expanding samsara of computing, abstractions must paper over deficiencies of the layers below them. Thus came fonts that just render a solid arrow as a ligature. Grab one of them, like Maple Mono https://font.subf.dev/en/
This sort of ligature usage is abuse of OpenType wrought with false positives. I am 100% on team mean-what-you-type since we have the technology. Grosser is the lack of curation & abuse that is NerdFonts.
Thanks for sharing this. Code fonts with custom icons and ligatures always felt wrong to me, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell why. I’ll start linking to this from now on.
Well, Linux fbcon (Ctrl-Alt-Fn screens) does not support a lot of Unicode and the patch does not seem to be able to tell that apart, which probably would require a bit of heavy lifting (depending on how accurately you want to detect Unicode support) or a quite dedicated flag. So, personally I would rather have less tofu blocks when I need to debug why my Arch fails to boot ;-)
Many Unicode arrows exist {EDIT: yes, and supplemental arrows and arrow heads, fat right-pointing triangles and on & on}. I doubt you would ever get people to agree. https://github.com/c-blake/lc lets you just put glyph = "whateverArrowYouWant" in your config file (yes, only documented in lc --help or the man page), including just an extra dash like " --> " if that floats your boat.
rm --no-preserve-root
so, was that eventually merged, or did the downstream distros agree that it would be a good idea to apply this patch themselves?
The page links to a response to this e-mail: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2012-01/msg00095.html
IIUC it added interactive prompt to --no-preserve-root. So it would ask for a confirmation beside the flag. This particular prompt was rejected, not the flag itself which was already there.
No mention of JSON output.I'm curious what's the reason behind this?
Probably because 20 years ago they would have rejected XML output. I won't be surprised if something in 20 years eclipses JSON output.
Machine readable format then - maybe I'm in the minority but I wouldn't care what the format is as much as it's possible to parse. Only having a flaky human readable output format is one of my least favorite things about coreutils.