Re: [PATCH/RFC] Fix for default pager

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 16, 2010, 06:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20100616062814.GA13481@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <gJV0lM_e77LzoiHR7moWdAApSZ7yI38lZ-w8kZwc97unWqtBc94nfg@cipher.nrlssc.navy.mil>

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:11:35AM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> So, I think it's appropriate to set DEFAULT_PAGER on IRIX.  There can't
> be many users anyway.  It's probably appropriate to set it on Solaris
> too, if 'less' is not a commonly installed component on modern systems.
> I wonder how surprised existing git users will be, for those on Solaris
> platforms that have 'less' installed, when Solaris's crappy 'more'
> becomes their pager.

I'm a little worried about that, too. On the other hand, wouldn't people who actually care about less have set PAGER already, to use it for things like "man"?

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> But, I also think it would be nice if git fell back to the 'cat'
> behavior when it fails to spawn the pager, because the following error
> is not very informative:
> 
>    casey@<a_solaris_box> # git log
>    sh: less: not found
>    Broken Pipe

The pager command is executed by the shell these days. Perhaps we should simply set DEFAULT_PAGER on these platforms to "less || more || cat", which seems to work from my simple tests. If that is too hack-ish (e.g., we really care about "does less exist", not "did it fail"), we can do a more invasive patch (or even provide a "git-pager" shell script helper to do a more thorough job).

-Peff