From: Christian Meder Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 22:08:12 GMT Subject: Re: "Read my lips: no more merges" - aka Linux 2.6.14-rc1 Message-ID: <1126822093.27951.74.camel@localhost> In-Reply-To: On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 11:15 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Thu, 15 Sep 2005, David Kågedal wrote: > > > > No, you read my message wrong, or I failed to describe it properly. > > No, I did get it. > > It's the Debian people who don't get it. > > Expecting other software projects to make cludges for Debian-specific > packages is _insane_. Actually according to Debian policy, sensible-pager is a cludge which should be used _only_ in the case that the upstream program is hard to adapt to a PAGER environment approach. Only in this case the upstream package should be patched to at least use sensible-pager. > > In other word, no sane package will ever use "sensible-pager", because > it's not a sensible thing to do. Once Debian maintainers are "Big Poo-Bah > And OverLord of the KnownUniverse" and can force everybody else to have > "sensible-pager" too, maybe -then- it might make sense, but until then > it's just an odd-ball Debian thing that makes Debian maintainers either > (a) maintain stupid patches to teach other programs about it or (b) have > normal programs that use the _standard_ pagers in the absense of $PAGER. > > And like it or not, there are two standard pages: "more" and "less". In > the immortal words: "To two shall you count. You shall not count to one, > except on your way to two. And you shall definitely NOT count to three, > not call it 'sensible-pager'". > > The fact is, we HAVE a sensible-pager, and it is called "less". > > And for old programs that assume that sensible-pager is "more", we either > install that _too_, or we make a symlink that points to "less". Debian prefers to call the symlink "pager" and let the sysadmin decide where it should point: less, more, whatever. The e2fsprogs upstream package for instance supports PAGER->/usr/bin/pager->/usr/bin/less. Granted /usr/bin/pager is probably Debian only but every upstream author deciding whether to use PAGER:more or PAGER:less is not _that_ much better. Just wanted to nitpick. Now you can reignite your flamethrower ;-) Christian > > And for people who want something else, everybody already supports the > STANDARD way of saying so: "$PAGER". > > In other words, "sensible-pager" buys you absolutely _nothing_. Except for > confusion and extra work. > > > The advantage is, I guess, consistency. Different programs don't have > > to encode their own default pager. > > No. That's NOT an advantage. It's a disadvantage. Different programs sure > as hell will not do silly Debian-only things, so it just means that if > Debian tries to enforce this, they're only causing more work for their own > maintainers. > > They're also causing more work and discomfort for their users, since now > their users will have to live with the fact that they are used to > non-standard behaviour. > > And it has _zero_ upsides. Exactly because it's not standard. There's a > lot to be said for "do it like others do it". > > Linus > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- Christian Meder, email: chris@absolutegiganten.org The Way-Seeking Mind of a tenzo is actualized by rolling up your sleeves. (Eihei Dogen Zenji)