Re: [PATCH] standards: rewrite section on quoting

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> I grew up with "I'm hungry" rather than 'I'm hungry'

Me too (in English).

Personally I use single-quoting (apostrophes) when quoting identifiers,
like @code{} in TeXinfo:
  'struct tm'
  The 'sentinel' attribute was added in gcc 4.0.
and double-quoting when quoting parts of English sentences, that is,
words that would have to be translated when translating the comment or
diagnostic to a non-English language:
  a file system is "remote" if ...

But I don't want to impose this style. Even an inconsistent use of '...'
vs. "..." is better than the unesthetic `...' that we have now.

> I estimate that adjusting gnulib to match this
> suggestion will require approximately a 500 kB patch:

Without the change of doc/standards.texi from a regular file to a symlink,
it is 250 KB in size.

I like this patch. It improves the esthetics of the comments and diagnostics.
We have been using the old `...' habit for years, even after the X11 fonts
were changed to use ISO-8859-1 and Unicode glyphs for U+0027, in 2001. This
patch will remove a deterrent effect that GNU sources used to have on non-GNU
hackers.

> Many of the patches
> are to files that we're importing from other packages -- I assume
> these fixes would be sent upstream.

Sure, this affects
 build-aux/compile                         |   24 +-
 build-aux/config.guess                    |   16 +-
 build-aux/config.sub                      |   14 +-
 build-aux/depcomp                         |   42 +-
 build-aux/elisp-comp                      |   10 +-
 build-aux/gendocs.sh                      |    8 +-
 build-aux/install-sh                      |   12 +-
 build-aux/mdate-sh                        |   14 +-
 build-aux/missing                         |  100 +-
 build-aux/mkinstalldirs                   |    6 +-
 build-aux/move-if-change                  |    4 +-
 build-aux/ylwrap                          |   10 +-

The change to lib/fts.c needs a bit more work; you've been mixing it with an
unrelated change.

Bruno