Why `%s'?
 

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Bock wrote:

> Why there's `%s' instead of '%s' in dpkg's messages?

It’s a historical thing[1]. On old terminals, the former looks
like ‘%s’ and the latter like ’%s’. dpkg is slowly moving away
from that[2]. doc/coding-style.txt explains:

On strings in code use simple or double quotes «'» «""». Not the unpaired
ones «`'». Strings marked for translation should only be fixed if there's
other changes to be done on them; otherwise we get unneeded fuzzies.

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html>

[1] Still encouraged by
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Quote-Characters.html#Quote-Characters
but that is probably for historical reasons, too.

[2] e.g., see http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2009/09/msg00067.html


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