Re: [PATCH 11/10] support pager.* for aliases

> On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 09:18:49PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>> 
>> >> > Until this patch, doing something like:
>> >> >
>> >> >   git config alias.foo log
>> >> >   git config pager.foo /some/specific/pager
>> >> >
>> >> > would not respect pager.foo at all.
>> >> 
>> >> Is it a good thing? Looks too confusing and I am having a hard time to
>> >> decide if this is "just because we could" or "because we need to be able
>> >> to do this for such and such reasons".
>> >
>> > I don't have a particular use for it myself. However, I don't see what's
>> > confusing about it. Would would you expect the above commands to do with
>> > respect to paging?
>> 
>> The reason I found it confusing was that I expected the "log" command that
>> is run as the expansion of the alias to be oblivious to the fact that the
>> end user called it "foo", and ignore anything specific to "foo", including
>> "pager.foo".
>
> I think of it this way:
>
> If the user thinks of the alias as just another form of "log", then we
> do the right thing: we use log's pager config by default, and respect
> pager.log. They never set pager.foo, because that is nonsensical in
> their mental model.
>
> If the user thinks of the alias as its own command, then they would
> expect pager.foo to work. And it does what they expect.
>
> But like I said, I don't personally plan on using this. It was just the
> only semantics that really made sense to me,...