[mcclung]

If you use open source software long enough, you will eventually be disappointed in a design decision. In this case, it was a big surprise when a tool I'd been using since the early 1990s suddenly changed its output with absolutely no warning. This is both an expected result from using Gentoo, and simultaneously very disappointing.

I don't think I was the only person unhappy with this. The fact that https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html exists seems to indicate that others feel as I do.

Furthermore, I was disappointed by the reaction from both the developers and other people leaping to their defense who felt that they'd been personally insulted by users suggesting that this may have been better as a non-default option. If I can set QUOTING_STYLE=literal everywhere, surely the distro maintainers who wanted this could have set QUOTING_STYLE=shell-escape?

I'd be the first to say that everyone is free to disagree with me. I have the source, I have a workaround, I adapt.

[cyphar]

I have been disappointed in FOSS design decisions before, but I've also been on the other side of such decisions as a maintainer -- and it's often the case that users aren't aware of all of the trade-offs that go into making "obvious" decisions. I try to be more understanding these days as a result -- yes, sometimes maintainers are wrong but all things being equal they probably know better than you or I what the right decision is.

For instance, one could argue that hiding the behaviour behind a flag makes the feature effectively useless (users that would benefit most from it would never know about the flag, and users who know enough to find the flag probably know about `find -print0` too). Punting the problem to distributions just means that everyone who is against the feature on general principle will now hound distributions for making the change (probably making arguments like "why are you making yourself incompatible with Debian X or Ubuntu Y.Z?") -- and will also result in the feature being unused and thus useless.

Now, is that enough of a reason to make a change to the default behaviour? I don't know, but to me it doesn't seem as though the right decision was "obvious". And again, the behaviour is only different when the output is displayed on an interactive terminal -- so the only breakage is the interface between the screen and your eyes.