I was merely musing on my experiences in that initial reply, not making
final proclamations or anything. Sorry if I gave that impression. I
realize there are advantages to allowing +, which you have ably
enumerated :).
I'm ok with proposing to rms that + be allowed, along with: -_.A-Za-z
I wasn't actually aware that . was allowed, but it seems ok to me too.
Isn't this an indication that *not* allowing the '+' character makes
it hard for the user to guess?
Certainly. If + had been universally supported in all needed contexts
from the beginning, that would have been much better. We don't live in
that world, though.
In my experience, '+' characters cause no more hassles than '-' and '.'.
I was referring exactly to the endless confusion/speculation by users
about whether + is used literally, or xx, or pp, or plusplus, or some
other variation. Perhaps allowing + in --with will allow us to reduce
that confusion, instead of increase it. We'll see.
Just to mention it: of course + is special in one way that - and . are
not: it's used to encode a space in some cases in url's. (This doesn't
seem like a serious drawback to me as far as --with goes, but just for
the record.)
Thanks,
karl
