Re: Proposal about --help options and man calls

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jul 18, 2007, 23:28 UTC
Message-ID: <85ejj5wats.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <7v644h715y.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Frequently, git somecommand --help will call the man command to
>> display help pages.  I think that when it does so, it should pass the
>> value of the GIT_PAGER variable copied into the PAGER variable: the
>> paging happens on behalf of git here.
>
> Hmph.  Is that to help people who uses GIT_PAGER but no PAGER,
> or have both but set it differently (setting both and in the
> same way does not make much sense).  But what it means is that
> "git command --help" and "man git-command" would be paged
> differently.  I highly doubt it is really desirable.
>
> What's the reason to set GIT_PAGER and PAGER differently to begin
> with?  Can people give examples of the reason why?

If I call command --help, I don't want a pager barfing at me. Never. I have scrollback for that. It is my choice when I page and when I page not. There are manual pages who go through 50 pages or so, however. There are commands that fundamentally are connected with a pager. man is, for example. But most cases where git calls a pager (and that includes his way of calling man without getting asked for it explicitly) utterly surprise me. So I set GIT_PAGER to cat and hoped that it would get git to behave. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum