Re: [PATCH/RFC] Fix for default pager

> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Johannes Sixt<j.sixt@viscovery.net>  wrote:
>> Your repository has only 2 commits and its git log output is less than 1kB,
>> i.e., sufficiently small to fit in a pipe's buffer.
>>
>> git log calls start_command to fork() the pager. The OS's scheduler does not
>> run the newly forked process immediately; rather, git log goes on with its
>> own business, writing output to the pipe that connects to the pager. Because
>> your repository is so small, git log never has to wait that the pager drains
>> the pipe. git log finally reaches exit(0). At this time, an atexit() handler
>> (wait_for_pager()) finally calls finish_command() to wait for the pager.
>>
>> This is the first time that the forked child process can run. Only now it
>> turns out that the pager cannot be run. The child process closes the pipe
>> and exits with an error, but it is too late: wait_for_pager() drops the
>> error return code of finish_command() to the floor. The parent process (git
>> log) can complete with the exit code that it was given earlier, 0.
>>
>> Repeat your experiment with ./git log in git.git itself to see the
>> difference.
>>
>> -- Hannes
>>
> 
> Capisco&  touché, with much more than 1k of info, git show ends with a
> "Broken Pipe"... seems hard to detect for little, recently started
> projects since I added more than 60k of scripts and I need to do 'git
> show' to understand that the problem is a broken pipe.
> 
> Now, let me think about it... do we need the pager_preexec function? I
> mean... it works fine without it, and the function is there because of
> a faulty 'less'.
> 
> My problem is obvioulsly solved by adding PAGER=more in my default
> environment, but I think this could be a litle bit embarrassing for a
> new user, mostly in environments such this AIX :P
>