[97893] trunk/dports/audio/shell-fm/Portfile

[Ryan Schmidt]

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.