Re: [PATCH 1/2] help: use man viewer path from "man.<tool>.path" config var

From: Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
Date: Mar 25, 2008, 06:19 UTC
Message-ID: <200803250719.02044.chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vd4poqwu6.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Le vendredi 21 mars 2008, Junio C Hamano a écrit :

Show 11 quoted lines

> Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org> writes:
> >
> > It's perhaps more honest, but kfmclient is not as well known as
> > konqueror.
> >
> > Isn't a documentation patch like this enough:
>
> I dunno.  I am not a KDE use to begin with.
>
> But I am somewhat uncomfortable with this kind of magic, and very much
> more so with basing the magic on the name of a binary.

I think in this case it should be ok if it's properly documented.

It's good to have a consistent user interface with meaningfull names for the available options. And we are right to try to do the same thing as when browsing an HTML man page.

In the documentation patch for "man.<tool>.cmd" that I will send just after this email, there is also enough information to understand what is going on and to find a good way around the magic if needed.

I can send the same kind of documentation patch for git-web--browse too, so we are completely consistent.

Show 8 quoted lines

> For example, if a distro offers two versions of konq to co-exist on the
> same system as konqueror-3 and konqueror-4 (with the usual symlink tricks
> /etc/alternatives/konqueror -> konqueror-3 and /usr/bin/konqueror ->
> /etc/alternatives/konqueror to make one version the systemwide default),
> people who want a particular version may say /usr/bin/konqueror-4 and
> would get frustrated to see kfmclient magic would not kick in.  By taking
> honest route without magic, you would not have to worry about such
> potential confusion.

In my experience KDE people have never changed the binary names like that. They just use (or advice users to use) different directory names and change environment variables (QTDIR, KDEDIR and maybe others) to point to the new dirs.

Thanks, Christian.