Re: [PATCH v6] help: colorize man pages

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 8, 2021, 17:48 UTC
Message-ID: <60bfad5f170df_1abb47208c1@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4ke8pig9.fsf@gitster.g>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I've been running with this on my personal git build since May 26th. I
> > haven't had any issues with it, and I like the new coloring.
> > ...
> > I think this is a good example of a change that we're better off just
> > merging down and then reverting if the wider audience of git users hates
> > it, rather than trying to come to some perfect consensus here
> > on-list.
> 
> My impression was tht we already had a rough consensus here on-list
> that it may be good to educate users who like this "new coloring"
> like you do to configure their "less",

Not true.

Jeff said users would probably have configured man to use colors themselves, but he never responded back when I asked him *how* [1].

It is a tricky question, because I already know it's not possible to do it in a way that works in all distributions, for all programs without polluting the user environment to do things she probably doesn't want.

> so that they consistently get the "new coloring" they like whether
> they are doing "git help git", "man git", or even "man ls", and the
> approach the posted patch takes will not help (it only affects "git
> help git" among these).

Please explain exactly *how* the user will be able to do that.

Moreover. I don't think git should be in the business of educating users how to use other software. The way they use less in conjunction with other software is up to them.

And in fact we already help naive users that have not configured their pager, so that it works better in git.

We do this for them:

  LESS=FRX LV=-c # see PAGER_ENV

Why aren't we "educating them" about LESS=FRX instead?

We have set good defaults for less since pretty much the start:

  f67b45f862 (Introduce trivial new pager.c helper infrastructure, 2006-02-28)

I don't think Jeff is the consensus. He expressed an opinion that perhaps X is better, but without clearly defining X, that's not really a viable option.

> I'd rather not to take it.

Can you explain why? All the outstanding comments have been addressed.

Cheers.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/60a96e76a4b20_857e92085c@natae.notmuch/

-- 
Felipe Contreras