From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:59:43 GMT
Subject: Re: fatal output from git-show really wants a terminal
Message-ID: <20081211225943.GA29311@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <200812111645.10067.bss03@volumehost.net>

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:45:05PM -0600, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:

> I did see a commit message mentioning some unusual settings for PAGER, but in 
> general, pagers are interactive.  I'd think the default behavior would 
> be "interactive <-> pager", with a config option to turn the pager always off 
> or always on.  From there, I would reason the test for interactivity should 
> be the POSIX test.

Right, but then that leads to the case I mentioned before. I think you
want to say "this is interactive _and_ our stdout is going to the
interactive spot". Which by your definition would be isatty() on stdin,
stderr, and stdout.

And maybe that is a better test, but I think it would be helpful to
provide a concrete example where that behavior works and the current
behavior doesn't.

> It looks like this test have have been attempting to follow the behavior 
> of --color=auto to GNU less and GNU grep (and possibly others).  This 
> certainly makes some sense as well, and may be less surprising.

Yes. You'll see we use a similar test for git's "auto" color.

> >And FWIW, I don't recall this ever being discussed before, but then I
> >have not been involved with git since the very beginning.
> 
> Google should be able to find it.  And worst-case, I can tell wget to spider 
> the archives and then run some sort of find/html2txt/grep on them.

I have the complete archive, and I couldn't find anything useful. ;)

Let me know if you want a copy (or you can pull it straight from gmane,
but it is somewhat slow IIRC).

-Peff