From: Jeff King Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:28:15 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH/RFC] Fix for default pager Message-ID: <20100616062814.GA13481@sigill.intra.peff.net> In-Reply-To: On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:11:35AM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote: > 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"? > 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@ # 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