For the record, I'll append what I said in 877582 so it's all in one
place:
You can call ls -N if desired or set QUOTING_STYLE=literal. I overrode
the default until such a time as a version of coreutils supporting all
of the new semantics/options reached stable, so that users could
configure stable and unstable debian systems consistently. That
milestone has been reached, so the package will no longer override the
upstream default.
It's also worth noting that the implementation evolved significantly
from the initial release in 8.25, based on user feedback. The major
functional issues have been addressed, so what remains is user
preference--for which there are configuration knobs.
