Slash and backslasth (was: bzr-0.1-rc1: selftest bug)

[Kevin Smith]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 20:26 -0500, John A Meinel wrote:
> I personally find the \ to be ugly, and lament that windows chose that
> route. I feel like the only real way that bzr would be appreciated under
> windows is if it has a gui. I don't think most windows people like to
> touch the console.

I agree that the \ is hideous, but it is a Windows reality. I think most
Windows users would prefer a GUI, but if none is available, many will
accept a command-line app. They have done so in the past with CVS and
SVN, as well as darcs and others.

> I think if someone is comfortable with the console, then they would be
> comfortable enough to not worry about the slashes.

I disagree. As a long-time DOS/Windows user, the \ was natural and I
would have cursed any app that required me to use /. Of course, now that
I have been Linux-only for years, the reverse is true.

> I'm not advocating that we depend on cygwin, just that I'm already going
> to be there, because cmd.exe is a really limited shell (poor grep, find,
> etc)

I think that would be a logical split for most people: use / under
cygwin, and \ otherwise. But in your case it sounds like you would
prefer / even in native mode. That seems odd to me, but if it's a common
case then some kind of option would probably be the answer.

Kevin