Re: Should "git help" respect the 'pager' setting?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 2, 2013, 22:24 UTC
Message-ID: <7va9n8m9rq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130530171431.GF17475@serenity.lan>

John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 10:38:59PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
>> Matthieu Moy wrote:
>> > I find it a bit weird that Git sets the configuration for external
>> > commands, but it may make sense. No strong opinion here.
>> 
>> I don't mean a setenv() kind of thing: how would we unset it after
>> that?  Perhaps something like execvpe(), passing in the environment as
>> an argument?

Running "man" is the last thing we do before exitting "git help" and exec_man_man() does seem to do execlp(), so I do not see it as an issue.

> Overriding PAGER might make sense, but I'd be quite annoyed if Git
> decided to override MANPAGER without providing some way to override it.

Hmm, see below.

> If a user sets MANPAGER then it's because they want a specific pager
> when reading man pages - invoking man through "git help" shouldn't cause
> it to behave differently in this case.

True, and for that matter, if the user sets PAGER to use with non-Git (including manual pages) and also sets GIT_PAGER to use specifically with Git, the user would be annoyed if we passed formatted manual pages to GIT_PAGER by exporting PAGER (or driving "man" with its "-P" option).