On Sep 18, 2012, at 23:03, Ryan Stonecipher wrote:

> Incrementing the revision (a one-character change) in the shell-fm portfile 
> resulted in automatic, unwanted changes to lines in the description.
> I fixed the description before committing the change which incremented the 
> port's revision.

Hmm. What caused the automatic changes? Your text editor?

> The smart quote characters display as gibberish in Terminal.app when running 
> 'port info shell-fm'.

They look fine here. I do have "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" set in my environment.

> What makes smart quotes characters better than dumb apostrophes and quotation 
> marks?

I would say that first and foremost, smart quotes are preferable in port and 
variant descriptions, notes, and anywhere else text will be displayed to the 
user, including our wiki and guide, for the same reason that they're preferable 
in the OS X user interface and in books and magazines and other material you 
read: they look better. They are typographically the correct punctuation marks 
to use in those places.

Now that we have for years decreed (via the modeline in every portfile) that 
portfiles are composed of UTF-8 text, I'm all for using UTF-8 characters in 
portfiles.

Using smart quotes also means you don't need backslashes before them, which I 
find makes reading and writing text in portfiles easier.

Maybe I shouldn't mention this, because it's really a different problem that I 
should fix separately, but the Tcl syntax highlighting that my editor 
(TextWrangler) uses doesn't really handle straight quote marks properly. It 
thinks they're the start or end of a string, so when for example an apostrophe 
occurs in a description, the rest of the paragraph is colored differently.

_______________________________________________
macports-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev

Reply via email to