Re: [PATCH 2/3] setup_pager: set MORE=R

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 4, 2014, 22:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20140204221220.GA5457@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqwqhtuojx.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:23:30AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> > does complicate the point of my series, which was to add more intimate
> > logic about how we handle LESS.
> > ...
> >                 return !x || strchr(x, 'R');
> [...]
> 
> I am not sure if it is even a good idea for us to have so intimate
> logic for various pagers in the first place.  I'd seriously wonder
> if it is better to take this position:
> 
> 	A platform packager who sets the default pager and/or the
> 	default environment for the pager at the build time, or an
> 	individual user who tells your Git what pager you want to
> 	use and/or with what setting that pager should be run under
> 	with environment variables. These people ought to know far
> 	better than Git what their specific choices do. Do not try
> 	to second-guess them.

Sorry for letting this topic lapse; I wanted to look at some possible Makefile improvements, which I'll be posting in a moment. I did want to address this point, though.

If we are just talking about packagers and defaults (e.g., setting MORE=R on FreeBSD), then I agree that the right tool for the job is empowering the packagers, and the Makefile knob we've discussed does that.

But there's another set of people that I was intending to help with the patch, which is people that have set up LESS, and did not necessarily care about the "R" flag in the past (e.g., for many years before git came along, I set LESS=giM, and never even knew that "R" existed). Since git comes out of the box these days with color and the pager turned on, that means people with such a setup see broken output from day one.

And I think it is Git's fault here, not the user or the packager. Our defaults assume that the user's pager can handle color, and that is not the default for many pagers, including our default "less"! The user did not turn off "R" here; they simply set other options they cared about, and our hacky workaround to auto-enable "R" did not kick in.

It seems a shame to me that we cannot do better for such users. However, the level of intimacy with the pager is getting to be a bit too much for my taste, and the saving grace is that not that many people set LESS themselves (and git is widely enough known that "R" is a common recommendation when people do). So it's probably the lesser of two evils to ignore the situation, and let people who run into it find the answers on the web.

So I think there is nothing to be done. But I did want to mention it in case somebody else can come up with some clever solution. :)

-Peff