Re: the pager

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 3, 2013, 02:57 UTC
Message-ID: <20130903025711.GA25617@elie.Belkin>
In-Reply-To: <201309030227.r832RmBd013888@freeze.ariadne.com>

Hi,

Dale R. Worley wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> That's true, but it would change the effect of using "cat" as a value:
> "cat" as a value of DEFAULT_PAGER would cause git_pager() to return
> NULL, whereas now it causes git_pager() to return "cat".  (All other
> places where "cat" can be a value are translated to NULL already.)
>
> This is why I want to know what the *intended* behavior is, because we
> might be changing Git's behavior, and I want to know that if we do
> that, we're changing it to what it should be.  And I haven't seen
> anyone venture an opinion on what the intended behavior is.

I don't really follow.

For all practical purposes, "cat" is equivalent to no pager at all, no? And the git-var(1) manpage describes the intended order of precedence, as far as I can tell, except that it was written before v1.7.4-rc0~76^2 (allow command-specific pagers in pager.<cmd>, 2010-11-17) which forgot to update some documentation.

Suggested wording for improving the documentation or its organization would of course be welcome. And I agree with Matthieu that the name of the pager_program global variable is needlessly confusing --- perhaps it should be called config_pager_program or similar.

Thanks, Jonathan